


On A Highway

by solongsun



Category: Dir en grey
Genre: Band Fic, Homophobia, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:12:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 40
Words: 124,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22132273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solongsun/pseuds/solongsun
Summary: Toshiya is the perfect bassist for Dir en grey - the only problem is, Kaoru can't stand him. As time wears on it becomes evident that the feeling is entirely mutual, but ambition and stubbornness hold the band together: neither Toshiya nor Kaoru will be the first to quit, and when attraction gets mixed up with animosity, it's obvious that something has to give...
Relationships: Kaoru/Toshiya (Dir en grey)
Comments: 240
Kudos: 125





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, look what I dragged out of the obscurity of the archive. I'm tired of fighting against my OTP: Kaoru and Toshiya forever, yo!
> 
> This story is getting the rewrite-and-finish treatment, even if it takes me the rest of my life. And it just well may.

Nagano, 1994.

This is how it started:

'You're in that band, aren't you? Charm.'

From the eaves of the live house roof the rain clattered like applause; beneath the overhang, dry but shivering in the cold night air, Kaoru tried to fix his face into a mask of unimpressed cool, and turned to see who had spoken.

A skinny, adolescent boy. Too tall for Kaoru's ego, wearing tatty all-black clothes, a rock 'n roll uniform that looked suspiciously homemade. Hair dyed dark blue, tendrils of it plastered to his temples with either sweat or rain. Inside it was overheated. Too many bodies.

'Yeah, I am,' Kaoru said at last, trying to sound gruff, bored. He tucked a strand of hair back behind his ear in the way his bandmates were always urging him not to do: too shy-looking, too unsure. 'And you?'

It was a reasonable enough assumption that his companion must also be in a band. The boy had his face powdered pale like he was going onstage, dark crayony lines exaggerating the shape of his eyes, that funny jewellish shade of hair. He fidgeted. His gaze on Kaoru's face felt somehow intrusive, impolite, too brazen; Kaoru fought the urge to cross his arms over his chest and stand up straighter.

'Got a light?' the boy asked abruptly, and Kaoru lit his cigarette with the filigree-effect Zippo lighter that was his eighteenth birthday present to himself (windproof, stayed lit even if you hold it upside down, lid opened and closed with a satisfying, adult-sounding snap). The boy, annoyingly, didn't seem to notice it: he just leant into its flame and then washed Kaoru over with a whole lungful of blue smoke. The brand on his cigarettes was – and here Kaoru wanted to grimace – _Gitanes_. Too cool. _Where's this kid finding French cigarettes in this dump?_ They were in a suburb of Nagano city, mountains in the background, buildings made of concrete.

'Gypsy,' Kaoru said, pretty stupidly. Luckily for him, his companion never studied French, so instead of sneering he just raised a puzzled eyebrow.

'Huh?'

'Gitanes. It's French. It means 'gypsy'.'

'Your bassist sucks,' the boy said.

There was a stunned silence.

'Ex_cuse_ me?'

'He sucks,' the boy enunciated more clearly. 'You need a new one.'

'Oh, and I suppose you're interested?' Kaoru said, although it was a little hard to get the words out, because his teeth were very tightly clenched together. The boy took another drag of his cigarette and manfully tried to stifle a cough.

'No,' he said emphatically, when he'd recovered, 'Your drummer sucks too. A sense of rhythm helps.'

'He needs practice,' Kaoru bristled.

'He _needs_ to give it up.'

There was a tense, offended silence. A gasp of wind blew a scattering of leftover autumn leaves across the pavement in front of them and a handful of rain into each of their faces; the boy swiped his face dry and the cosmetics around his eyes smeared cheaply.

'Anything else?' Kaoru said icily. 'Anything on our singer, perhaps?'

At this the boy did the worst of all: he just snorted. Kaoru was aware that his knuckles were white, and there was a steady pounding going on behind his left temple that felt worrying. He took in a deep breath through his nose and lit up a cigarette of his own, stalling for time.

'Yeah,' Kaoru said at last, his voice stiff and tight with the effort of remaining under control, 'Well, at least you've _heard_ of us. Who the fuck are _you_?'

The boy curled a lock of his own hair around the tip of his finger, twisting it tight. 'I'm Toshiya,' he said arrogantly.

'You in a _band_, Toshiya?'

A slight hesitation. 'I'm between bands right now.'

There it was: Kaoru's reward for being so restrained. 'What a surprise,' he said, enjoying every syllable, and he allowed himself a mocking smile when Toshiya rounded on him: the move was, unfortunately, less intimidating than Toshiya might have intended. Taller though he was, Toshiya was also gawky, almost painfully so, with skinny teenage limbs that he hadn't fully grown into yet and a clumsily-cut fringe blunt across his forehead, trying and failing to hide a too-youthful face. His cheeks were going pink.

'What the fuck is that supposed to mean?' he snarled. '_Anyone_ can get a bunch of nothing musicians to play with them. I'd rather be on my own than be mediocre.'

'_Fuck_ you,' Kaoru snaps, his hand curling into an angry fist, 'I wouldn't play with you if you _paid_ me.'

'I wouldn't play with you if you _begged_,' Toshiya countered cuttingly, and at that point Kaoru turned away: it was either that, or hit him.

'Enjoy obscurity,' he tossed angrily over his shoulder, a vein pulsing dangerously in his neck, not even caring that he was getting soaked as he walked away: from behind him he heard Toshiya's young, angry voice, faraway-sounding through the rain: 'you just wait! I'm going to be famous. I'm going to be _so famous_!'

And he was right, of course. But neither of them knew that yet.

At twenty years old Kaoru was a lot of things. He was stubborn, and proud, and insecure, and arrogant.

But he wasn't _stupid_.

He pushed Toshiya firmly out of his mind, of course, but within a few weeks, his band Charm had lost their bassist. In fact, they'd more than merely lost him: Kaoru had seen to it that the hapless man and his equally useless instrument were well and truly mislaid.

There was a gleam in his eyes, over those weeks, that suggested he was taking a cool pleasure in this, in trimming the fat, and – deeper down – an almost childishly desperate desire to get ahead. Ambition: for the first time in months he felt it take him over completely again, the way it had before, when he first ran away from home. It was as though something had been placed inside him, that night in Nagano, something like placing a sharp grain of sand inside the shell of an oyster: a sort of constant, prickling irritation around which great things, valuable things, might grow.

He recruited a better bassist against a background of mutinous rumblings from his bandmates – perhaps not entirely undeserved, as whilst he was at it, he was auditioning a new drummer or two on the sly. He found one with a sense of rhythm but approached the substitution with somewhat less tact and delicacy than the situation required, and suddenly Charm was an orphan band consisting of a guitarist, a drummer and a bassist who had never even shared a stage. Kaoru spent a few weeks attempting to convince himself that this was for the best; he put quite a bit of effort into it, actually. Then the lease on his apartment ran out and so he decided, on a whim, to not renew it and to move from Kobe to Osaka instead.

Sitting with a single suitcase and his guitar on the intercity bus, putting the miles between himself and the squirming embarrassment of his failure, a bone-deep exhaustion swept over him, and he realised that it had been days since he'd actually slept. His body felt almost transparent with fatigue but his mind stubbornly refused to shut up: it talked at him incessantly, webbed the area behind his eyes with dense headaches, rang an incessant alarm bell inside his ears. Back in Kobe, his ex-bandmates knocked on the door of his former home until the new tenant finally answered and suggested, wisely, that they fuck off, and in Osaka, the months passed and Kaoru had insomnia and did session work for other, luckier bands. He clenched his teeth so often he found his jaw ached every morning: he turned twenty-one and celebrated alone. In 1995 he happened across another guitarist wasting his time and talent playing sessions, a cheerful man built along the design of a pipe-cleaner: thin and lanky and pliable, bendable, accommodating. Die had a wide smile and fire-engine-red hair and a night job wrapping luxury chocolate bars in silver foil for an independent manufacturer. He lived on chocolate trimmings and beer and coca-cola, and he had the kind of addictive personality that Kaoru, in his head, associated with greatness. They went out for a drink together.

'You in a band?' Kaoru asked, carefully casual. He could only manage one weak domestic lager for every two Die dispatched.

'Sort of,' Die slurred, propped up on one elbow. 'I mean, yeah. We're called La:Sadie's.'

'Weird name.'

'Yeah,' Die said meditatively, lighting a cigarette. 'It's kind of a weird band.'

Of course, it came as no big surprise to Kaoru that La:Sadie's had no vacancy for a guitarist – and it wasn't really a big issue, either. This was the sort of thing he was good at: the stripping, the reorganising, shuffling a bunch of faulty parts into a machine that worked. In the case of this particular band, the faulty part were clear: the lead guitarist, Shio, was an optimistic teenager given to over-dramatic solo and three-chord melodies. A poor fit, like a cog that wouldn't turn. He was so easily removed, so easy to replace. Kaoru didn't even feel bad about it.

The bassist, Kisaki, was a trickier issue: he was somewhat sharper, shrewder, but he wore long false fingernails that impeded his playing; he suggested that Kaoru might don a pair of darkly feathered strap-on angel's/devil's wings when they performed, large and obstructive, and when Kaoru asked how the hell he was supposed to wear a guitar strap with such an outfit, Kisaki just shrugged.

The fall-out from that lasted days and made the windows rattle in their tiny rehearsal space, and when it was all over and the dust had settled, Kaoru was almost surprised to find that he had won. The row between them had been so catastrophic that it seemed amazing that anything at all was left, but something was left: a band. A proper one, one that would work. _His_ band, now. Nearly.

He forced himself to be clear-headed. He took stock: two guitarists, a drummer, a singer. The drummer was a sweet teenager, all loose-hinged joints and hard-working determination: Kaoru approved instantly of Shinya.

The singer, though, was somewhat of a stranger being.

Of all of them, Kyo was the only one who didn't offer a real name alongside his stage name, and when they all went out for a drink to try and figure out how things were going to go – Shinya surely only being served because he looked so much like a girl; no bartender would ever be that forgiving to a boy so obviously underage – it became apparent that Kyo didn't touch alcohol, and so he sat sober and cynical whilst everybody else drank around him. Kaoru nursed his beer. He had an impression of having to approach Kyo almost at a diagonal, like he would a cat, careful not to look too interested: he took small sips of his drink and let the hours pass, and at long last he was rewarded by a pair of dark, hypnotic eyes floating far too close in front of his own in the dimness of the bar. Kyo cornered him in the booth and explained, in a tone of absolute solemnity, his plan.

Kaoru noticed that he very carefully avoided calling it a dream. Sitting half in, half out of the shadows, he looked like a particularly mad ghost.

'Visual rock,' Kyo hissed derisively, savagely, stabbing at the air with his cigarette, 'Is a _platform_. It's not forever. It's for launching us. It's for—'

He cut himself off, frustrated, trailing smoke. 'I don't want to look soft and pretty,' he spat at last. 'It's all ugly. The _world_' – here his eyes bore hard into Kaoru's own – 'is _ugly_. I don't want to be anything that isn't real.'

He sat back then, smoking silently, his eyes still focussed in narrowly on Kaoru's face, assessing him. Kaoru was careful to keep his face very neutral, so he wouldn't reveal the riotous spark of excitement he felt inside.

In his mind's eye he could see a bright, shining bubble of a future, floating in front of him, only just within reach. The bubble was tiny, perfect, golden, glistening, and contained within its fragile walls was an image of the four of them and a faceless other, standing on a stage. The crowd were so loud that they were deafening. The applause was so thick it felt warm.

Kaoru mashed his cigarette out into the ashtray on their table. Steadily, he returned Kyo's intense eye contact. He leant forward. He noticed, in the routine sort of way that you notice the colour of somebody's hair or eyes, that the sound system in the bar was now playing _Islands in the Stream_. He felt a flicker of doubt – it didn't really feel like the most auspicious of beginnings – but pushed it aside.

'We can do it,' he said in a quiet voice, boldly ignoring the sounds of Dolly Parton in the background. 'We'll work so fucking hard. We'll find a bassist. Gain a following, and then we'll start leaking pictures with no makeup. We'll be accessible like visual bands never are; we'll let ourselves get sweaty and dirty, we'll play overseas; we'll break America. I—'

_I can make you a star_. The words were on the tip of his tongue: the most seductive sentence that words ever made. _I can make you a star_.

As if he'd spoken aloud, Kyo scrutinised him even harder, leant even further forward, stared into his eyes with their faces no more than an inch or two apart. And finally, he gave a short, curt not.

They renamed the band Dir en Grey. It didn't really mean anything, but Kaoru had had the name in mind for a while. He'd always liked the sound of it.

Now, Kaoru didn't really view what he did as manipulation, although he was aware that some people might and that they might not, when it really came down to it, be incorrect.

It was just that it felt so _justified_. He was gifted with something more than the ability to compose songs and play guitar, gifted with more even than ambition: he had _vision_. It gave every decision he made a pleasant, removed quality, as though he was only acting upon the orders of some higher, smarter being: somehow ousting Shio and Kisaki from their band and abandoning his old bandmates in Kobe felt not only like part of the natural order, vicious but necessary as the food chain, but also – in a surprisingly smooth, easy-to-swallow way – those things felt like they weren't really very much to do with him. Looking back on what he'd done, he just couldn't seem to be able to feel that bad about any of it. He felt, at most, a little pinch of surprise that he could have been so ruthless, and in his less hopeful moments he wondered what sort of karmic retribution a fair universe might have lined up for him – but as it happened, he didn't have to wait long to find that out. All he had to do was start auditioning for a bassist.

It turned out that finding exactly the right bassist for Dir en Grey was somewhat harder than expected.

Their auditions were two-part process, consisting of what Kyo described – a little sourly – as being like a driving test: practical and theory. As soon as he said this, Die broke out into some surprisingly cackle-like laughter, elbowing Kyo riotously in the ribs, and that also happened to be the day that Shinya tried a cigarette for the first and last time (he took one puff of Die's proffered one, wrinkled his nose, and then set it down again with a politely disgusted 'no, thank you.'), because by that point they had been auditioning bassists for going on three months.

They interviewed bassists good, and bassists bad. They sat in a line – Kyo bored, slumped over; Die fidgeting; Shinya painfully polite – as Kaoru dismissed people before they could even open their mouths: 'Too old,' he said to one, an instant dismissal. To another: 'Too young. Sorry.'

It wasn't that he was trying to be unkind; it was just that he had a very specific mental image of the right type of person, and he didn't want to waste his time with anybody who he knew in his heart to be wrong. He relied, as always, on instinct. Vision, again. It made him lethal.

Besides, it wasn't always him shutting these auditions down. One bassist entered their practice room only to be instantly frozen in the glare of Kyo's laser-beam eyes. In perfect silence, the two of them glared at each other, hardly even blinking.

'Uh. So,' Die tried gamely to interrupt; the singer held his index finger up firmly to silence him.

'One minute, Die,' he said seriously.

Their interviewee readjusted the strap of his bass on his shoulder and then, looking somewhat aggrieved, walked out of the room just as silently as he'd come in.

And if it wasn't Kyo, then Die would lean over and whisper some damning distinctions in his ear: 'not him; he's a cokehead', 'absolute sociopath, wouldn't risk it', 'I think he slept with my sister. I'm gonna kill him.'

So: 'All right,' Kaoru found himself sighing at last, 'Let's just – give up on Osaka.'

'We can't move,' Shinya squawked, uncharacteristically panicked. Kyo ruffled his hair, uncharacteristically affectionate. Die watched everything uncertainly, uncharacteristically silent.

'I think the idea is that the new recruit moves here,' Kyo explained, and then flashed a very hard look over at Kaoru. 'Shinya wants to stay based in Osaka, where his family is. That's all right, isn't it?' he said pointedly, and Kaoru felt his cheeks heat up slightly. He was very aware that Kyo was telling him, rather than asking him.

'Of course,' he said steadily, even if he _had_ always imagined himself living in Tokyo when he got famous, 'That's fine.'

Kyo eyed him for just longer than was strictly comfortable.

'Good,' he said finally, neatly. Kaoru swallowed.

'Let's – get on the road, then.'

And so they went to Kyoto and Kobe and Tokyo. They went to Hiroshima and Nagoya and Kaoru insisted upon a detour to Yokohama, because that's where Hide is from and in his head, that felt auspicious, like just beyond the city borders the pavements might glow with greatness; they didn't find a bassist but Kaoru did meet his hero and get a photograph signed _good luck, Hide_.

So they went to Kofu. They went to Nagasaki in the south and Tottori in the west, went to places green and places coastal and places mountainous and in the end, they even went to Nagano, because by that point Kaoru couldn't quite remember why he had such a weirdly embittered feeling about it.

As it happened, of course, he met a bassist who instantly reminded him.

Toshiya's name felt like it burned his tongue to say it.

But in 1996, Toshiya looked cowed and downtrodden.

In 1996, Toshiya's hair was back to its natural black and had grown longer – was in need of a cut, actually – and his nails were bitten brutally short and his clothes were still homemade but faded now and sporting a few clumsy repairs. He used the last of his cash to pay for the train ticket to the audition, and he couldn't afford to get home: he approached the audition with the stark desperation of a starving animal.

He passed the practical with flying colours, but the theory – that was where Kaoru was really going to let him have it. He smiled.

'You know, it's funny,' he said, 'But you don't actually seem to be all that famous, do you?'

'Shut up,' Toshiya mumbled shortly. 'Do you want me or not? Because I have other offers.'

'This is quite difficult for you, isn't it?'

'Do you want me or _not_?' Toshiya snapped.

Kaoru guessed that the bassist was about one sarcastic remark away from actually stamping his foot, and he thought it might be quite fun to make the arrogant little prick do that.

'You two know each other?' Die asked, his obliviousness either real or feigned, it wasn't clear, and Kaoru forced himself to tuck his smile away.

'This is Toshiya,' he said, and added by way of a polite introduction, 'Toshiya thinks I'm mediocre.'

It was obvious how much he was enjoying himself. Kyo made a little snorting sound that could have been either amusement or an actual snore; he was perfectly capable of falling asleep in most every situation, and with his eyes concealed behind dark glasses it was impossible to be sure.

Kaoru regarded Toshiya thoughtfully. The bassist was standing tall even though his cheeks were fiery red; his legs were braced apart and his arms crossed petulantly over his chest. He held Kaoru's eye contact steadily, refusing to give in, and Kaoru found himself forced to look away first.

A rare occurrence, losing like that.

'He plays well,' Shinya opined quietly.

'I like the fact that he pisses you off,' Die volunteered.

Kaoru rubbed his chin pensively. Through the others' critique, Toshiya had never once taken his eyes off him.

'How much do you want this?' he asked bluntly.

Toshiya had a face like thunder but he said, clearly, 'I'll do anything.'

'Oh, you shouldn't say that,' Shinya warned him courteously, 'If you say that to a producer they'll just try to take advantage and they'll end up expecting—'

'I don't care if they do,' Toshiya interrupted staunchly. 'This is my dream and I'll do whatever I have to.'

There was a short silence.

'Oh,' Shinya said.

But Kaoru found himself smiling.

That was how it started.


	2. Chapter 2

Toshiya staggered over the rainy ground, guitar case bumping and scraping unceremoniously over the streets behind him. He _hated_ Osaka in winter; hated it in every season, actually, but winter most of all. The weather refused to get _properly_ cold, not freezing like it did back at home, and instead of snow all they had was a seemingly constant rainfall that made him feel chilled and damp and uncomfortable all the time. He hated the endless grey streets and the bald white lights of the studio, he hated the high-rises and above all, he hated the way his bandmates laughed off his complaints without realising that he felt homesick enough to die.

He seethed. He was nineteen, not even an adult yet, and although he'd suggested a compromise – moving to Tokyo, the halfway point, which would actually make a lot more sense from the professional point of view if they'd just _consider_ it – they'd shrugged him off, made sympathetic noises but shook their heads.

He ran a hand through his hair agitatedly. It felt rough because he'd just dyed it: Kaoru was very firm about a particular shade of blue.

When he sighed his breath came out as a formless cloud of white. It was raining again and it was January, a dismal wasteland of a month, and he was hauling his bass to the bus stop just to go back to an empty hole of an apartment in an anonymous building in a tiny fraction of a city that he didn't even know.

'What's eating you?'

When he arrived at the bus shelter Kaoru was already there, head tipped back in sleepy satisfaction, smoking leisurely with his guitar nestled safely between his knees. He could afford to smile: they were writing an EP and he was well aware that it was going wonderfully.

When Toshiya didn't answer, Kaoru wriggled around to face him, careful to keep his balance on the thin bench: it was the hard, slanted, cruel kind designed to repel tramps and transients, and Toshiya perched on it moodily. His instrument was lying at his feet in its scuffed case, not protectively tucked in like Kaoru's was, and even though there was nobody around to possibly trip over it Kaoru still found that grating.

'C'mon,' he said a little irritably, 'What's up with you? Work too hard? Turns out you won't do anything after all?'

'Just homesick,' came the faint, disinterested reply, and Kaoru sighed.

'_Still_? It's been months.'

All he got back was a shrug. Kaoru pulled his jacket tighter around him.

'If I was from where you're from,' he said plainly, 'I'd be feeling grateful to get out. Small towns creep me out.'

'Shut up, will you?' Toshiya said tiredly. 'I'm not in the mood, okay?'

There was a short silence.

'All right,' Kaoru said, honest surprise in his voice: he hadn't ever heard Toshiya sound quite so drawn and nervy before. 'Sorry.'

That prompted a searching little glance from the younger man: either one of them apologising, that was a first. Kaoru was feeling quite proud of himself until, aggravatingly, Toshiya just shrugged his acceptance and turned back to study the empty street in front of them. The rain made a pecking sound against the roof of the bus shelter, and a chilly wind was attempting to tug Kaoru's scarf away from his neck; he tucked it more tightly into place.

'Cold, isn't it?' he said with forced friendliness, but Toshiya just snorted.

'Call this cold,' he muttered, 'You have no idea what proper cold feels like.'

'Look—'

'You're such a fucking pussy—'

'All right, that is _enough_!' Kaoru interrupted, slamming his open hand against the glass of the shelter so hard that it rattled in its frame and Toshiya visibly jumped, 'What is your problem, exactly? I'm trying to be _nice_ to you here, God knows _why_, since all I'm getting back is the same fucking pain the ass!'

Toshiya closed his eyes. He felt tired and hungry and chilled to the bone, like he was going to shake for hours; he thought of his home – that dark, cramped, falling-down little house – and felt an ache of longing so strong that it hollowed him, coring him out like an apple. He hadn't ever even liked it that much, living there – it wasn't as though it had been a place where he'd belonged – but he'd _known_ it, at least. It hadn't ever scared him like this.

His only answer to Kaoru was a stony silence. Cursing softly, the guitarist crossed his arms over his chest and turned back to face the road.

To anybody looking on, the two of them might have appeared funny together: polarised, too similar, dressed alike and carrying almost identical instrument cases and yet shoved up dramatically and resentfully in their separate corners, a cold length of bench and icy silence and hard rainfall between them. They were both completely quiet until the bus came, and when they climbed aboard Toshiya pointedly put his bass on the seat next to him so that Kaoru couldn't sit there.

Not like he would have done anyway, not like he even would have wanted to, but Kaoru still seethed. In retaliation he very ostentatiously took the seat directly behind the bassist, sighing heavily, and knew he'd succeeded in annoying him when Toshiya turned abruptly around, his pretty face set in a fierce scowl.

'Leave me alone.'

Innocently, Kaoru shrugged. 'I'm not doing anything. You're the one turning around to talk to me.'

Toshiya squeezed his eyes shut for somewhat longer than a blink.

'Look,' he said at last, his voice low and quiet but with a slight shake beneath it, 'Can't you just take the next bus, or something? I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm really not exactly falling all over myself to put up with your stupid _shit_ this evening.'

'Yeah?' Kaoru snapped back harshly, 'Well tough luck, because this is the last bus and I'm sure as hell not walking home in the rain just because you're being a spoiled, stuck-up little—'

Without a word, Toshiya stood up and stormed away back down the slippery aisle, his face very young and pale looking underneath the fluorescent lights. The doors had just been about to fold shut and he jammed his elbow in between them roughly, scowling as he used his own limbs to awkwardly wrench them open, and the driver's mouth knit itself into a tight line as Toshiya dropped down the step and back into the frigid night air. The door closed quietly behind him again, the engine coughed into life and when Kaoru craned his head to peer after him, he was just in time to see the look of panic fly across Toshiya's face.

His bass was where he'd left it, on the seat next to his now vacant one.

Kaoru and Toshiya's eyes met through the window.

It was as physical as two boulders smashing together, as two tectonic plates grating alongside each other: the smug self-righteousness in Kaoru's eyes and the murder in Toshiya's, meeting with enough force that Kaoru was surprised the glass in his window didn't go ahead and shatter. Standing on the street Toshiya looked very cold and alone but also furious, and Kaoru watched as he turned to pound on the door of the bus again, demand re-entry, but with a grind of gears and a sudden lurch, the bus pulled away and left him standing there on the pavement, growing smaller and smaller until they swung around the corner and he was erased from view.

Kaoru settled back in his seat a little uneasily.

He had the distinct impression that Toshiya's bass guitar was watching him reproachfully, and irritably he leant back and shut his eyes so he wouldn't have to look at it.

_It's his own damned fault. If he wasn't so impulsive – so immature – so careless with his stuff. What the hell is he doing leaving something like this behind, anyway? Doesn't he take any of this seriously?_

He considered that he would be well within his rights to simply leave Toshiya's bass where it was, propped up incongruously on an empty seat, and to go home and go to sleep with his own possessions all safely accounted for. He figured that would just about serve Toshiya right; teach him to be more careful with things that were important...

Kaoru sighed, feeling a headache starting. He leant forward and pressed the _stop_ button; they'd just turned into his neighbourhood. The bus hissed slowly to a stop, and he was amazed to find himself thinking about it – actually considering it, leaving Toshiya's bass behind.

_Serve him right._

He gritted his teeth, and grabbed both instrument cases. They were bulky and cumbersome and he got stuck a couple of times trying to force his way down the aisle; they cluttered up the door frame and his own guitar case – hitherto completely unscathed, in just-purchased condition – caught against the hinge and gained a long, thin scratch all the way down its centre where he forced it through.

A vein was throbbing in Kaoru's neck. He was cold to the bone and angry, and he had five flights of stairs to make his way up yet. Breathing in harshly through his nose, he swung his own guitar case onto his back and picked up Toshiya's, hefting it a little awkwardly because he wasn't quite accustomed to its additional length and weight.

He figured he probably had time for a long, hot shower before Toshiya caught up with him and started banging on his front door. That would be nice.

Feeling suddenly exhausted, he began the slow trudge through the rain to his apartment building.

As he stormed along the rain-spattered streets, his every footfall sending up a small shower that got inside his shoes and pooled around his toes, Toshiya counted to ten. He could hear his breaths coming out high and fast, so shallow that he was almost panting; he didn't have an umbrella, didn't even have a raincoat, and his hair was plastered to his face and neck and scalp and his clothes were not just damp or even soaked but _dripping_, weighing his tired body down. His reflection in the dark shop windows that he passed looked like a drowned ghost, freshly spat from a watery grave and out for vengeance. So not too far from the truth, really.

He and Kaoru didn't live that close together. They caught the same bus, and they even got off at the same place, just a little south of the Tsutenkaku Tower, but from there they took completely separate directions: Kaoru north, up past Ebisucho Station and not all that far from Zepp Namba; Toshiya further south, deep into Nishinari. His neighbourhood was worse than Kaoru's – he knew that now, though he hadn't when he'd elected to take the place; he'd just been relieved that the rent was somewhat reasonable and he wouldn't have to sleep on Kyo's floor any more – but he thought Kaoru's building, when he saw it, was decidedly more depressing than his own. It was a tall, skimped-on sort of structure, skinny and composed entirely of water-stained concrete, a series of disjointed balconies sticking out like teeth. He was afraid for a moment that the main entrance would have some sort of a buzzer system, and that Kaoru would refuse to let him up, but it didn't: instead the front door, cheaply made and installed, yielded almost disconcertingly easily to his touch. The staircase was narrow and draughty, filled with the kind of light fixtures that buzzed. Toshiya left little puddles of rainwater all the way up.

Kaoru said: 'You look like a drowned cat.'

The shower he'd taken had chased the chill from his bones and the stiffness from his muscles, and when the angry knocking started at his door, he'd forced himself to relax and take his time: he'd pulled a T-shirt over his head and stepped into pyjama pants, run a hand through his mostly-dry hair and eyed himself anxiously in the mirror: same old him again, weary and concerned-looking, pinched and small. _Small_, he hated that most of all. It wasn't a nice feeling, having somebody bang against the front door of his home so violently: it made him feel weak and vulnerable.

As gently as possible, he opened the door and tried to smile. The drowned cat comment slipped out before he could help it, but Toshiya seemed not to hear. Rudely, he stepped forward and simply barged Kaoru out of the way, striding into his home like he owned the place.

'_Ow_—' Toshiya had knocked him right into the wall, and he rubbed his hip resentfully, 'What the _fuck_? You can't just barge in here.'

'Where's my bass.'

'You know I could actually call the police on you for doing this, right? You can't just force your way in to other people's homes—'

His own indignation cut him off: Toshiya had alighted upon the guitar case leaning up against the wall and seized its handle with both hands.

'Don't worry,' he muttered, swinging the case around as he started back towards the door, 'I'm leaving.'

He found Kaoru blocking his path obstinately, bare feet braced on the floor in case the bassist tried for another shove. Toshiya grit his teeth slightly.

'Get out of the way.'

Kaoru stood his ground, looking unimpressed.

'Get out of the _way_.'

Carefully Kaoru enunciated, 'That's my guitar you've got, you fucking idiot.'

His face almost expressionless, Toshiya dropped the case directly onto the floor, jerking a scandalised cry from Kaoru's throat and a stream of indignant pounding from the floor below.

'Where's mine,' he said flatly.

'Toshiya—'

'_Where's_ _mine?_'

And Kaoru didn't know what made him say it. Maybe the look on Toshiya's face, maybe the way the water was streaming off him onto Kaoru's floor, maybe the way he'd dropped Kaoru's guitar like it was nothing or the sheer outrageous rudeness of how he'd shoved him to the side and barged in here – maybe all of it together. But he felt his face arrange itself into a faux-apologetic shape; felt his voice become quiet and beseeching; felt the words form in his throat and fight their way out past his teeth and lips:

'I left it on the bus,' he lied stupidly, and waited.

Toshiya lunged.

'You – fucking – _freak_!'

The impact send Kaoru to the floor, half in and half out of his apartment; he grasped for Toshiya's wrists, fought his way up into a sitting position whilst the other man hissed like an angry cat, fingers hooked into claws and one knee landing squarely in Kaoru's belly, winding him, 'You bastard, you _uptight_ – screwed up – you immature _cunt_!'

'_Fuck!'_ Kaoru wheezed, jamming his own knee upwards to catch Toshiya in the chest, pitching him off. He heard the other man gather himself for a renewed attack and threw a hand up in blind defence; it found Toshiya's face and mashed into it, stifling his breathing and grinding his lips against his teeth in an effort to push him away. Toshiya bit viciously – _bit_ – and Kaoru felt hot wet blood trickle down his palm, smudging over Toshiya's chin.

'_I'm_ the freak?' he snarled disbelievingly, butting his head up hard into Toshiya's neck. He was rewarded by the sound of the bassist choking but had no time to feel victorious; he flailed, grasped hold of Toshiya's neck for balance and successfully yanked himself back up to his feet, though he was unable to take more more than a single, wobbling step before a vice-like hand closed around his ankle, clawing at him desperately. Unbalanced, Kaoru fell back to the floor with a heavy thud, prompting more banging from below and a curious starry shadow in front of his vision. He thought his ears might be ringing, but otherwise it went quiet. All he could hear outside of his own head were two sets of ragged, uneven breathing.

In the other corner of the tiny living room, fetched up against the wall, Toshiya hoisted himself up into a wincing sitting position. His throat felt full of glass and his fingers had cracked where Kaoru had stepped on them: he bent them painfully and reassured himself that they weren't broken. He could taste blood when he swallowed, but his greater concern was the guitarist: he licked his split lower lip anxiously and began to crawl over to where Kaoru was lying, completely prone on his side.

'Kaoru?' he asked tentatively, his voice hoarse and reedy. No response. He touched the older man's shoulder gently, a terrible, sick kind of worry flooding through him, 'Hey, Kaoru—'

He found himself suddenly flipped over and slammed onto his back, staring up into Kaoru's triumphant face.

'Got you,' the guitarist said grimly, legs astride him and arms pinning his wrists down with bruising force. Furiously Toshiya arched his neck, reared back as much as he could and spat derisively into Kaoru's face.

Silence, then. Bloody saliva dripped down Kaoru's cheek, and somehow calmed, the two of them looked at each other.

'If I let you up,' Kaoru said steadily, 'Are you going to behave?'

'Fuck you,' Toshiya retorted breathlessly, and Kaoru squeezed his wrists painfully.

'_Are you going to behave_?'

Silence. Toshiya struggled pointlessly – Kaoru must have been using every ounce of force he had to keep him down – and finally, finally, gave a single, curt nod. Carefully, releasing his hands last, Kaoru climbed off him and wiped the spit from his face. He offered his good hand to Toshiya, but the bassist ignored it and chose to pull his own self up.

'Shit,' Kaoru cursed, studying his palm, 'I can't believe you _bit_ me.'

'I can't believe you left my fucking _bass_ behind,' Toshiya croaked, and coughed roughly.

In a somewhat smaller voice than normal Kaoru said: 'I didn't really. It's in my bedroom. I just – I don't know. Wanted to get to you.'

There was a long moment where Kaoru was braced, ready for Toshiya to lunge at him again: the other man had his eyes tightly closed and was breathing deeply, apparently trying to drag himself back under control. In the end, though, Toshiya just sat down heavily on the sofa and curled forward, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He touched blood on his chin and grimaced, scrubbing at it.

'You're fucking insane,' he said at last, his voice cracking weakly. Kaoru hesitated.

'Yeah. Maybe. Sorry.'

'I thought – somebody could have stolen it, or something, or—'

'Nobody would steal it,' Kaoru said uneasily, 'It just would have ended up back at the depot, or something. They must have a lost and found. I mean, you wouldn't take a bass guitar that you found on a bus, would you?'

'No,' Toshiya lied unconvincingly, and Kaoru snorted. That earned him a light punch to his shoulder – when did he get close enough to allow that to happen? – but there was a rueful sort of smile curving around Toshiya's lips.

'We didn't all grow up like princes,' the bassist remarked wryly. 'Sometimes you have to take what you can get. Finders, keepers.'

'Oh yeah?'

'Yeah.'

'Have you ever stolen anything, then?' Kaoru asked interestedly, taking advantage of this new, bizarre truce, and was answered by Toshiya's sudden, hot blush. 'No _way_.'

'Look—'

'What did you _take_?'

'Just small stuff!' Toshiya said defensively, his face growing redder and redder, 'Just – like records and stuff, clothes, sometimes. After my parents divorced – I mean, neither of them could really take care of me, so I moved in with my grandmother, and we didn't have a lot of money or anything.'

'Oh. I didn't know your parents were divorced.'

Toshiya snorted abrasively. 'Why _would_ you?'

There was another silence, not quite comfortable, and Toshiya ran an anxious hand through his hair. 'It was ages ago, anyway.'

'How old were you?'

'What? Nine. Look—' he got abruptly to his feet, tugging his wet sleeves down roughly, 'I should go home, it's late.'

'C'mon. Don't be stupid.'

'What?'

'It's gone one. It's not like the buses are running.'

'So?'

'So it's like a forty minute walk to your place, and you live in a bad area. Just stay here.'

Toshiya gave him a look that plainly suggested what he thought of that.

'I think I'll take my chances, thanks,' he said loftily – or at least as loftily as he could manage with that broken-glass feeling still in his throat – and Kaoru rolled his eyes.

'Don't be a prat,' he said tiredly. 'Just – you can have my bed, all right? I'll take the sofa. I just want to go to sleep and not have to worry about you making your way home.'

Toshiya was quiet. He touched his lower lip lightly, like he was checking to see if it was swelling up.

'I get your bed,' he determined, and Kaoru nodded.

'Yeah, if you want. Whatever,' he mumbled. He felt oddly uncomfortable, like he'd left part of himself exposed: he felt like saying something brash and thoughtless, _or whatever, I don't care either way_, but the words stuck in his throat because, weirdly, he really did want Toshiya to spend the night. There was something newly patched between them, like they could even become friends out of this; he wanted to witness Toshiya doing something simple and human, like sleeping. He wanted to see him vulnerable; he was _nice_ when he was vulnerable.

Or nic_er_, at least.

'Fine,' Toshiya grumbled at last, getting to his feet, 'But first I want to take a shower; I'm cold as fuck.'

'Whatever. The bathroom's through there.'

'And I need something to sleep in.'

'Yeah, okay. Whatever. Can we just go to bed?'

Toshiya eyed him sharply.

'_You_ can go to the sofa,' he said pointedly, and slammed the bathroom door behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I would not generally expect this to be updated this quickly. I've been busily rewriting the 30+ chapters I already had...


	3. Chapter 3

It was much too late, of course, but as the hands of the clock passed four Kaoru realised that he probably shouldn't have volunteered to sleep on the sofa: that in fact, that particular move had been a spectacularly dumb one.

He could cope with the discomfort – the lack of a pillow, the errant spring under the left cushion that kept digging into his lower back – he was so tired that he probably could have fallen asleep on a bed of nails, if it wasn't for the light.

That toxic orange city light, streaming in through the uncurtained window.

Kaoru turned onto his left side, turned onto his right, rolled onto his back and curled up and stretched out and kicked the covers off and then retrieved them again. He sighed, a long sigh that seemed to hover around his head, making his mind feel busy and foggy. He'd never been able to sleep without total darkness, ever; in his bedroom there were heavy blackout curtains and, most important – and somehow embarrassing – a black fabric eye mask to block out any errant photons that might invade his soft, dark cave. The window in the bedroom backed onto a dank little alleyway between his and another apartment block, strung all over with sagging washing lines – not the nicest view, perhaps, but a dim and restful one, and a thousand times better than the window in this room, which looked out on the Tsutenkaku Tower and the blindingly bright light it hoisted up into the sky.

He couldn't really explain why the light bothered him so much. It just seemed to worm its way around all of his defences: the earplugs he put in to block out the drone of traffic and the voices and activities of his neighbours; the lock and double lock and deadbolt he put on his front door to quell his fear of any home invasion. He could even block out his own anxiously revolving, stressful thoughts, if he really put his mind to it.  
But the light was a different matter. Kaoru sighed and tried squeezing his eyes more tightly closed, but all that gave him was a tense little headache. He felt too hot, and then too cold. He decided to get up even though he didn't want to: the sofa was warm and he was tired, but he felt he couldn't face another second of lying there sleepless. He groaned, hitting his head irritably on the arm of the couch before reluctantly planting his feet on the floor. Staggering into the tiny kitchen space, he stood in front of the sink and deliberated between getting a glass of water or else simply knocking his head against the faucet until he passed out. At the very least, he would probably break the sink. Then at least he'd have the repairs to occupy him until dawn.  
His dreamy thoughts made him feel like he was sleepwalking. Maybe he even was: maybe he wasn't responsible for any of his actions at all.

Kaoru turned to face his bedroom door and paused thoughtfully. His eye mask was in there, exactly where it always was, in the topmost drawer of the battered metal filing cabinet that served as his bedside table (he'd happened across it in a skip when an office building down his street was being gutted, and had come back that same night to rescue it and take it home. It was ugly as hell but very convenient). The only obstacle between him and sweet, precious, wonderful darkness was a – hopefully – sound asleep bassist.

Tentatively, he stepped closer and touched the cool wood of his bedroom door, fanning out his fingertips as though he could feel the quiet dark space beyond. Carefully, he pressed his ear up against it, but he couldn't hear anything: only the rain and the distant city sounds of traffic noise, aeroplanes overhead; the sounds that never stopped.

Kaoru's hand lifted, as if of its own accord, and dropped down lightly onto the door handle. At a pace just slightly faster than that of the average glacier, he turned it, centimetre by wincing centimetre: it was the kind of handle that creaked as it turned, the sound massive in the stillness of the night. He gritted his teeth, willing it to stay silent, and with a final soft click the latch sprung free and the door opened an inch or so. Carefully, he pushed it further.

The relief that flooded him was so strong and sudden that his whole skin seemed to flare with warmth, and he let out a breath that he didn't realise he'd been holding: inside his bedroom all was absolutely still and silent. Toshiya hadn't even drawn the curtains; a dim, rainy orange light fell over the bed and showed him to be safely unconscious, sleeping with the intensity of a newborn, his brow furrowed and his arms squeezing a pillow tightly to his chest.

It was almost surprising, until Kaoru reminded himself that Toshiya was, after all, just a person, and not some sort of dark overlord who would sleep hanging upside-down, like a bat.

On tiptoes now, he inched closer. Toshiya sighed in his sleep and stirred. The drawer of the filing cabinet gave an indignant screech when he pulled on it and Kaoru froze in his actions, eyes wide, but Toshiya simply frowned more deeply and slept on.

_Thank fuck, thank fuck_. Inch by inch he eased the drawer out, ready to bolt at any second should Toshiya wake, but apparently he slept like the dead. Kaoru almost envied him. A little blind feeling about in the darkness, and his eye mask was safely in his hand. He negotiated shutting the cabinet again with little trouble – it seemed to have made its final stand and lapsed back into its normal, well-behaved silence – turned to tiptoe back to the safety of the living room, and then hesitated.

It was so weird, seeing him there sleeping; so surreal. He hadn't really given much thought to what a bizarrely intimate arrangement this was: Toshiya's limbs all twined up in his bed sheets, his body lying there so undefended. It gave Kaoru a guilty feeling, as though he'd gone into an art museum and found all the security systems down: he knew that he _wouldn't_ steal anything, but just the thought that he _could_ made him feel somehow blameworthy.

Toshiya had the covers dragged up to his chin. His feet would have probably hung off the end of the bed if he hadn't been sleeping so tightly curled up. His hair was spread out over the pillows, the blue shining softly in the darkness, and it suddenly seemed so bizarre to Kaoru that this person could _bug_ him so – more than he'd ever been bugged in his life, and in such a myriad of different, increasingly complicated ways. It just didn't make any sense.

Sighing softly, Kaoru rubbed his knuckles against his aching forehead. Strange as it seemed, much as he disliked Toshiya, he had to admit that, in some odd way, he was fond of him too.

Peculiar sort of thing to realise. He couldn't quite escape the feeling that his days might actually be quite dull without his almost hourly fights with the bassist, and he certainly couldn't deny that their rancour was productive: with the two of them constantly trying to outdo each other, their debut EP was getting written in about half the time he'd expected. They might drag themselves around like numb, driverless trams through lack of sleep, might play until their fingers bled and have screaming, floor-and-wall-shaking rows – but whilst the other was still hanging around, he knew that neither one of them would give up. Ever.

Suddenly, unaccountably, he felt furious. He turned on his heel and just barely resisted the urge to slam the bedroom door behind him when he left. He climbed back onto the sofa and drew the blankets around him with white-knuckled fingers, kicked out at the sagging springs and, despite the eye mask, was still wide awake when the sun came up.

Perhaps it was the sleepless night, or perhaps it was the disturbing revelation that his creative drive seemed to feed off his own dysfunctional relationship with his bassist: either way, when morning finally came, Kaoru found himself sitting hunched at his table and wound up as tight as a tourniquet. He could feel it in his face, the way his jaw was clenched so tense it felt spring-loaded and the way the frown line was carved right down deep between his eyes: something in him was yanked taut, and it was starting to fray.  
He showered in a daydream. He kept it short, leaving plenty of hot water for Toshiya simply because he didn't feel like he could face whatever row would follow if he didn't. He ate his breakfast in silence and felt far away; he'd had sleepless nights before, but the cold pools of morning light on the floor had never before made him feel so _sick_. He left his breakfast half-eaten and huddled over coffee instead, drinking it black and bitter, and listened absent-mindedly to the shower running. He turned on the radio for the morning news and didn't take in a single word.

By the time the band had assembled at the studio that morning, Toshiya felt like he was going to have some kind of dramatic, rage-fuelled stroke.

It wasn't just that his new-found truce with Kaoru had fallen spectacularly apart again; in fact, that was actually a very small part of it. Really, he was angry because he woke up angry, and he woke up angry because his sleep was interrupted with a dream that his stupid, big-headed band leader was staring down at him moonily – and because when he woke up after that, confused and dry-mouthed and alone, it was only about five o'clock in the morning, and when he fell back to sleep again afterwards, he immediately began having dreams about him. _Those_ sorts of dreams.

Kaoru sucking him off; Kaoru fingering him, fucking him. In his most vivid dream Kaoru had him bent over the bed in a place he'd never been before and was stretching him with no fewer than four fingers, teasing him in the most intimate of ways and acting so fierce and so dominating and so _sexy_ that it made him weak and breathless.

And Toshiya woke up, gasping, to find himself sticky with cum. On closer inspection, so were Kaoru's sheets, and Toshiya actually considered twisting them into a noose and hanging himself with them rather than face this new humiliation. He knew Kaoru loved nothing more than embarrassing him, and he felt sick when he pictured the delighted smile lighting up the guitarist's face, the look of joyful disbelief; _you did_ what_?_

He dealt with it, in the end, by furiously stripping the bed and marching the bundle of sheets straight past Kaoru without a single word of explanation, ignoring the slack, zombie-like look on his face and loftily demanding to know where his laundry room was. He carried the sheets with the damp patch guiltily folded in, but even so he imagined that he could feel it seeping wetly over his fingers, and it made him shudder a little because although there were times when he loved that feeling, cum on his skin, there were other times when it happened to be eight o'clock in the morning in his worst enemy's apartment, and the cum was his own, and it felt cold and embarrassing. Down in the building's basement, he crammed the sheets straight into the washing machine and resolved to say and think no more about it – except of course Kaoru had been tailing him stupidly the whole way down, and of course he couldn't resist opening his big fat mouth.

'What, did you wet the bed or something?'

A forgivable joke, but an exceptionally ill-timed one. Toshiya gritted his teeth and forced himself to retort that his grandmother had taught him to _always_ take care of the bedlinen after being an unexpected overnight guest, because it was _polite_, and what, was Kaoru raised by _wolves_?

And it made him even madder because just looking at Kaoru made him think of his dreams, and his face got hot and red. He called Kaoru disgusting, and Kaoru said he was acting completely insane and that he was like a wild animal, and in the end Toshiya slammed out of his apartment just as soon as he'd collected his bass, and they took separate transport to work.

'Oh my gosh,' Shinya exclaimed, wide-eyed as he bent over Kaoru's tightly clenched fist, 'What happened to your _hand_?'

Kaoru had bandaged the wound that morning, not because it was bleeding or in need of compression but because the teeth marks in his skin were deep enough to be scabbing over and were very, very obviously caused by a human bite. He hesitated, flexing his fingers thoughtfully. He was so furious he could hardly think straight: there was a slight twinge of pain that brought both last night's and that morning's rows back to him with a crash, and he flicked his eyes over to Toshiya narrowly.

'You know what,' he said decisively, 'A dog bit me.'

A horrible, rippling discord from Toshiya's bass guitar made Shinya jump, Die jump, and Kyo jump awake. (He wasn't a morning person.) Only Kaoru sat unperturbed, glaring daggers at his bandmate.

'This really big, mad-looking dog,' he elaborated stiffly, 'With these horrible jagged fangs.'

'Oh no,' Shinya said miserably, all but wringing his hands, 'Did you report it? You didn't report it, did you? Because if you report it then sometimes they make the owner put the dog down, and—'

'Don't they say that dogs can sense when people are assholes?' Toshiya cut in acidly, and though a muscle twitched dangerously in Kaoru's jaw, he ignored him.

'I didn't report it,' he said carefully, seized by new inspiration. 'It was owned by this poor little old lady who could hardly control it. She said it wasn't even hers; it was just some mutt that her daughter and son-in-law used to have, but she ended up getting stuck with it because _they_ didn't want it.'

There was a crash as Toshiya stood up so abruptly that his chair toppled over behind him; grimly, his jaw locked, he stalked across their tiny studio space towards the door. His bass guitar was looped around his neck on its strap like a particularly cumbersome necklace; it stuck in the door frame and his four bandmates watched quietly as with shaking hands he unhooked it and set it carefully down. He slammed the door tightly behind him, and his footfalls echoed like thunder in the stairwell.

'Wow,' Shinya said quietly. Die frowned.

'What the hell got into him today?'

Kaoru shrugged and went back to his guitar. Shinya shifted his feet and looked uneasy.

'Someone should go after him,' he said at last, and wearily Kyo got to his feet.

'I'll go. He's in a fucking foul mood.'

'He's got a split lip, and his neck's all bruised up,' Die said meditatively. 'I wonder if he's been in a fight, or something.'

'That's his business,' Shinya said primly, and sighed. 'It sort of makes me worry about the band, though.'

'What, if he can't keep his temper, you mean?'

'Well...'

'Hey,' Kaoru interrupted, feeling newly anxious, 'That's – this is all a bit much, isn't it? Toshiya...he's one of us now. I'm sure he's got a good reason for his mood, all right? Or – the bruises, I mean. And his lip. Maybe he fell down.'

There were times when Die, Shinya and Kyo showed exactly how long they'd all been hanging around each other: they each fixed him with exactly the same, slightly curious look. Kaoru raised his bandaged hand stupidly.

'I'll go after him,' he said. 'I can't exactly play much anyway, with this.'

Kyo gave a _be my guest_ shrug – or maybe it was more of a _your funeral _shrug – and Kaoru bent down, setting his guitar awkwardly back in its case. He felt like what he was about to do was downright suicidal, but he also knew that he'd gone too far, and that he was the one who was responsible for making things right again.

Die and Shinya shrugged, already losing interest; it was only Kyo who kept watch. His eyes followed Kaoru's back all the way down the stairs, and it was a long while before he turned back to the others.


	4. Chapter 4

Kaoru already felt pretty bad, but when he saw Toshiya sitting outside, he felt worse.

It could have been the weather. It was just beginning to snow, a wet, scanty sort of snow that wouldn't settle, and something about the defensive sweep of hair hiding Toshiya's face made him look like a teenage runaway, lost in a haze of white flurries and very, very alone.

Kaoru swallowed awkwardly, realising a little too late that actually, Toshiya _was_ a teenager, at least for another few months, and though he may not have been a runaway exactly he was stuck very far from home, without any conceivable way back. There was snow collecting in his hair and Kaoru felt like brushing it away, but he knew he couldn't get that close. One touch and Toshiya might have his hand off at the wrist.

'Hi,' he said uncomfortably. Toshiya didn't look at him; just raised his cigarette to his lips. Gitanes, Kaoru remembered. He held it limply, his forearm balanced precariously on his bent knee; it spilled ash between his legs. Kaoru shifted closer.

'Look,' he said, his voice soft, 'I'm really sorry.'

Toshiya shrugged. 'Doesn't matter.'

'No...' Kaoru struggled, 'I shouldn't have said that stuff.'

It seemed they were at a stalemate: all Toshiya did was shrug again, roughly. His mouth was set in a bitter line, and he seemed to be debating what to say; he made several false starts, opening his mouth and then closing it again, his thumb flicking over the butt of his cigarette agitatedly.

'Yeah,' Toshiya said finally, 'You shouldn't have. But it's fine.'

A cold wind ruffled his hair and he flinched, tucking it behind his ear. He wasn't wearing a scarf, only a sweater, and the bruises from their fight were bluish on his skin; Kaoru stared, at them and at the sweet young curve of his cheek, trying to think of something to say; something more than 'sorry', to show how much he meant it.

In the end he just exhaled lowly and slid down beside him, grimacing; even through his clothes the street was freezing, and when he got settled his body immediately did a huge, involuntary shiver.

He thought he saw a small smile twitch at the corners of Toshiya's lips.

'You call this cold?' he asked slyly, his voice almost too quiet to be heard, and with a thrill of relief Kaoru gave him a soft elbow in the ribs.

'Cute,' he said sarcastically, and was rewarded briefly with a gawky sort of grin.

The silence they lapsed into then was different; not awkward, exactly, but not friendly either. Sitting that close to each other, they shifted uneasily.

'Kaoru?' Toshiya said at last.

'Yeah?'

Pause.

'I'm sorry I bit you.'

There was another small silence.

'That's okay,' Kaoru said eventually, uncomfortable. Because Toshiya was being all quiet and soft and sort of vulnerable, he thought the bite was actually even kind of cute, in a weird way. 'It's just – kind of strange, though.'

Like a little animal, nipping at him in fear. Kaoru gave his head a soft, weary shake, resolving to get more sleep that night, because clearly this lack of rest was not doing great things for his mental faculties.

'Yeah,' Toshiya said in a small voice, 'Well, you were mashing my lips into my teeth, and it really hurt. My _fangs_ being so _jagged_ and all.'

Kaoru chuckled humourlessly, and Toshiya gave a rueful little smile. Suddenly, sitting there in the first wispy snowfall of the year, he felt like telling Kaoru just how _lost_ he felt in this great big neon-lit city; how he'd never even stepped foot outside of Nagano Prefecture in his life and now he was living _here_ and it made him feel scared for every single moment of every day; and just how _lonely_ it was to pretend like he was feeling so safe, and so at home, when that seemed to come to everybody else so naturally. He chewed on his lip. Sometimes he felt flattered by the faith his bandmates seemed to have that he'd be able to adjust so seamlessly; on other occasions he felt furious at them for so blithely assuming that the move would be no big deal for him. A few times now he'd even packed to go home, though he hadn't told anybody that. Once he'd even made it as far as the train station before turning back.

In his head, he realised, he privately blamed Kaoru. He was nineteen years old and had never cooked a meal or lived alone or driven a car, and yet somehow he was expected to master all of these things by himself: he felt childish, but he also felt abandoned.  
But when he thought about it – as much as he liked to irrationally blame Kaoru, fighting with the guitarist was also the one thing that helped to distract him from his surroundings. Arguing with Kaoru, he could be anywhere. It filled in the gaps that even music left empty.  
Toshiya glanced at his bandmate uneasily. He decided to keep quiet. He knew he'd probably never breathe a word of it to anyone.

Despite the way Kaoru was shivering, the two of them stayed outside for a good while longer. They didn't talk much, but they chain-smoked and traded comments about the people who passed by them; threw out the occasional thought about the direction their recording sessions were taking; expressed their individual prides in their work and carefully left out the doubts. Toshiya still felt awkward, more embarrassed about his dreams than ever against the cold reality of the city streets and hoping to hell that Kaoru's washing machine had erased all evidence of what he'd done; still he couldn't help but wonder, briefly, what it would have been like if Kaoru had discovered him. He could see it quite clearly in his head: the guitarist looking down at him as he slept tangled in the sheets, waiting and just watching as his dick pulsed wave after wave of cum over the bed linen—

And Toshiya flushed so darkly that he had to get to his feet and take a short wander down the street, feigning a need to stretch his legs, just to stop Kaoru from seeing his face. The cold air stung against his hot cheeks; he'd always hated how easily he went red. It struck him that if he was going to blush so easily, he should at least have been given a life that wasn't quite so crammed full of humiliation.  
'All right?' Kaoru asked, looking at him strangely as he made his way back up along the frozen street, and Toshiya shrugged.  
'Sure.'

'Okay.' Kaoru ground his cigarette out on the pavement and made to stand up, 'Ready to go back in?'

'Yeah. In a few minutes,' Toshiya said, sitting back down where he had been, and he couldn't help but smirk at the disappointment on Kaoru's face as he sank back against the wall, hugging his arms around his chest tightly. Without any warning, the guitarist suddenly sneezed. He looked instantly pissed off about it.

'Hey,' Toshiya said kindly, 'You can go on in, if you want.' He paused. 'You know, if it's too cold for you...'

Of course, he knew as well as Kaoru did that he had just thrown down the gauntlet: neither of them were going anywhere, now. Kaoru narrowed his eyes against the chill wind – or perhaps he was just glaring at Toshiya – but he stubbornly lit up another cigarette, and therefore doomed himself to sit outside and smoke it.

'I'm fine,' he said staunchly, 'You're the one I'm worried about. Winters are different here.'

'You're going to get sick,' Toshiya said idly.

'_You're_ going to get sick.'

Toshiya snorted.

'Please. I'm used to the cold; I'm not the one shivering all over the place. This is nothing. Want me to put my arm around you?' he offered sweetly, laughing when Kaoru rather flamboyantly flipped him off.

And Kaoru looked at him laughing; at how young and happy he seemed when he wasn't scowling. He kind of liked that, he thought; he really kind of liked that a lot.

And so he laughed too, and he passed Toshiya his lighter, and they both sat and smoked until Die came down to call them in. They couldn't play, then, because their hands were so numb.

In the end, they both got sick.

As the hours ticked on, the snow started coming down heavier; it even settled, finally, and Toshiya found that it depressed him. He was used to country snow, which seemed to him to always come in great lumps; _mountain_ snow that blanketed everything the eye could see and stayed stuck for weeks, _months_, whilst icicles grew on trees and cold air prickled in the throat; _real_ snow.  
In Osaka, the coating on the ground was so thin that he could see dark pavement wherever he stepped, and in a matter of hours it turned slushy and grey.  
And, like the snow, his truce with Kaoru didn't keep. It lasted perhaps nine hours or so, time enough to cover lunch and work and dinner and work again: it stretched from about half past ten to almost eight o'clock, by which time Shinya, Kyo and Die were all thoroughly tired of hearing Kaoru's attempts to synchronise guitar solos with a bandaged hand. They left early, and made no effort to disguise how satisfied they were at that fact; Die and Shinya decided to go out for drinks, claiming a celebration.  
Kaoru gritted his teeth. Toshiya scowled. Kyo scowled, too, but said he would go along to supervise. There was a dark look in his eyes that suggested he had no intention of smiling even a little for the next few hours, and Toshiya wondered why on earth he put himself through it.  
He decided not to ask, though.

  
  


When Toshiya and Kaoru were alone in the studio, it looked bigger.  
Toshiya noticed this as he looked around, thumbing his E string absently and killing time whilst Kaoru cued the playback; in future years, they would have studio techs to bother with the electronics, but in those early days Kaoru managed it himself, going mainly by instinct and flat-out refusing to read the dusty old manuals he found piled in a store cupboard somewhere; after so much time, there was hardly any way of telling what manual went with what haphazard old bit of machinery, and even thinking about them all gave Kaoru a headache. They didn't keep many lights on, because they paid for the power they used, and on that chill evening Kaoru sat on the floor grappling with the set of colourful wires that sprang chaotically out of their old analogue synthesiser – a machine they were all wary of, because it tended to spark off and shock them apparently on a whim, but until they could afford better it would have to do. Kaoru noticed that the task of wiring it up seemed to fall to him, more often than not; the general opinion was that the delicate operation would appeal to his meticulous nature.  
Contrarily, he hated the machine and would have happily set fire to it. If he knew how to work it, the act of plugging it all in might have soothed him – the gentle clicks, getting everything in its right place – but as it was he hated to sit on the floor and get all dusty, he hated getting shocked, and most of all he hated the muddled way it made him work: it was an object so disordered that he could not bring order to it, and so he detested it simply because of its illogical nature.  
'Need a hand?' Toshiya offered at last, squatting on his haunches next to Kaoru and blocking his light; irritation flashed briefly over the guitarist's face, a cloud covering the sun, and then it was gone.   
'I'm fine. Thank you.'   
'Doesn't this one go here, though?' Toshiya asked, yanking on a red lead and jamming it into a blue-ringed jack. He pursed his lips, 'No, that's not right—' and shoved it instead into the jack that Kaoru was just reaching up for, a yellow wire in his hand.   
'That's not right either, Toshiya,' Kaoru said, as patiently as possible.   
'You sure?'  
Deep breath. 'Yes. The yellow leads go in the yellow holes, blue in the blue, and so on. That's kind of...' kind of _obvious_, his mind screamed at him, 'Kind of how it works.' He tugged out the cable Toshiya had placed with an efficient snap and let it fall to the floor. He could feel Toshiya's shoulder pressing lightly against his and badly wanted to shove the other man away: it had been a long, tense day and he wanted time alone to figure this out; space in which to think and breathe.  
'Oh, right. So what about this?' Toshiya said enthusiastically, giving a boisterous yank to a green wire. There was a subdued snap, and he gazed down at his handiwork in utter puzzlement: the cable was now nodding headless in his hand, its pin decapitated and stuck firmly inside of the body of the synth.   
'Huh,' he said quietly, and jumped almost out of his skin when Kaoru slammed an open hand against the side of the machine. A cloud of dust enveloped them both, and Toshiya sneezed delicately, like a cat.  
'Look,' Kaoru said dangerously, 'Just...go and sit somewhere else, all right?'  
Toshiya's face darkened, and he dropped the cable like it was burning him.   
'Fine,' he said. 'You don't want my help, _fine_.'   
'Helping?' Kaoru repeated incredulously, '_Helping_? How the hell are you supposed to be helping, Toshiya? You just made everything _worse_!'  
Toshiya stood up wordlessly and walked away.

  
Things devolved from there. Kaoru had to wear a rubber glove and use tweezers to retrieve the broken pin, sighing between his teeth all the while; Toshiya sat rigidly in the corner with his bass, occasionally retaliating by grinding out a deep, reverberating note, just to make Kaoru's hands slip. It was sick, he thought grimly, the pleasure that gave him.  
'If only you could make your notes that clear when you play for real,' Kaoru snapped eventually, jamming the last cable into place. He botched it slightly, so he was even denied the satisfying little click of it going in: what kind of loving god would allow that to happen? Sitting in the corner, Toshiya gritted his teeth and kept himself quiet by pulling on his own hair until his eyes started watering; when he opened his hand, he found several dark blue strands sticking to his palm.   
'Can we just play now?' he muttered, 'I want to go home.'  
Kaoru closed his eyes for something longer than a blink.  
'Fine,' he said after a moment. 'I want to hear what you've got for _Erode_.'   
'So you can tell me how bad it is?' Toshiya retorted before he could stop himself. He saw Kaoru's fingers twitch.   
'_No_,' the guitarist said, too patiently, 'So I can work out how the _ridiculous_ guitar part you've written is supposed to fit in with it.'   
Toshiya cracked, lunging towards him, and Kaoru snatched up both of his ready fists in a surprisingly hard grip, leaning in to take the momentum away from his movement: 'I am not fighting with you again,' he hissed, his face about an inch from Toshiya's as his fingernails dug into his skin, 'So stop behaving like a fucking_ wild animal,_ and just do it.'   
He released him so suddenly that Toshiya staggered backwards, but he did pick up his bass and sit back down. The muscles in his arms stood out as tense as tightropes, and Kaoru could see how his chest was twitching, up and down, with every furious beat of his heart. He stood in front of the bassist with his hands on his hips, closing his eyes so that Toshiya's sulky appearance wouldn't make him any angrier than he already was: there was a loaded pause, and then Toshiya began to play.  
Kaoru sighed harshly. 'Too fast,' he said, and it was all he said. Toshiya stopped dead.  
There was a silence as sharp as a knife edge, and finally he started up again. He managed about four bars.  
'Too _fast_!'  
It is _not_ too fast! It's my song! How can you tell me it's too fast when it's _my_ song and _I_ wrote it and _I'm not playing it wrong!_?'  
'This is exactly your problem!' Kaoru barked, jabbing a finger at him, 'I don't care who wrote it; it's not _your_ song, it's Dir en Grey's song.'  
'What you mean is that it's your song!' Toshiya said accusingly, 'Yours, so you can fiddle about with it and change it and just – and just—'  
'And just?' Kaoru prompted a little mockingly, and once again Toshiya leapt to his feet and stormed towards the door. He was ripping his bass angrily away from his body before he even reached it, this time. He made it through unimpeded.  
Alone in the studio, Kaoru buried his face in his hands, and then raked his fingers back through his hair. There was something hot and smeary in the front of his mind, blurring like tears. His fingers shook. He counted to ten.  
Then he straightened up, picked up the bass, and started to run through the song.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, thanks everyone for reading so far! It's so cool to keep running across those of you who knew this story from back in the day, so thanks for saying hi!


	5. Chapter 5

January passed, finally, and through it all Kaoru and Toshiya did an admirable job of ignoring each other. February broke, ugly and damp, and every day the sky spawned the same dull white; bright, but flat. The streets started to get busier, and everywhere Toshiya went he felt crammed in and suffocated by the sheer number of people; more people than he had ever seen in his life. He navigated his way around the city pressed up against the walls of tall buildings and tripping off of curbs; he still got lost easily, but it didn't seem to make him panic like it used to. Now, he thought: fine. I'll stay lost.  
At the beginning of the month, Kaoru made the girl he had been anxiously seeing for weeks into his steady girlfriend. He announced this like it was nothing, carefully casual, but the rest of the band was sensitive to his nerves and so understood what this achievement meant to him: they were as studiously blasé with their congratulations as Kaoru was with his announcement – the gentlest thing, together, that a group of young men can do.  
Toshiya, unfortunately, hadn't been around for long enough to know exactly how hopeless Kaoru was with women, shy and awkward and prone to losing his carefully ordered mind, and so he snorted and commented that it certainly took him long enough—  
Kaoru said that maybe he would have gotten there quicker if he wasn't always stuck in the studio, sorting out Toshiya's mistakes—  
Shinya reflexively ducked, in case something was thrown—  
And so another day passed in a tense, frosty silence. It was beginning to become so much of a routine that nobody could really be bothered to act surprised by it any more.  
'Don't you wish those two could get along,' Shinya said once, dreamily, sat on the sofa for a fifteen-minute stretch of coffee break.   
'You want everybody to get along,' Die said, 'Even your cat and dog don't fight. Such a peacekeeper.'   
Shinya smiled and shook his head shyly, and there was a slightly embarrassed sort of quiet, during which Kyo sat down heavily between them on the sofa. He stretched his back so the bones made popping sounds. He cracked his fingers and asked Die who he thought shot first in the cantina scene in _Star Wars IV: A New Hope_; Han Solo, or Greedo. Because if you thought about it, he opined heatedly, it sort of changed the whole feeling of the franchise, and Han Solo's character arc. Were you supposed to believe that people could change, or not?  
  
That February, Kyo turned twenty-one. His birthday was spent taking photos; the band was herded into a spotlessly white room and posed awkwardly, adopting stiff stances and facial expressions that suggested somebody very beloved had just died; they put on stiff, scratchy, elaborate costumes that left them uncomfortable and unable to sit down.  
More than anything, the costumes left them looking ridiculous. They walked out of their separate changing cubicles, saw each other, and immediately and rather unprofessionally burst out laughing.   
'_Die_,' Toshiya wheezed, holding his fingers under his eyes so that his eye makeup wouldn't run down his cheeks, 'Your hair looks like it's gonna fly away. Is that a _beak_?'  
'I thought of it more as a sort of – horn. Bit more majestic. More _macho_. Like a—'   
'Narwhal,' Shinya substituted neatly, and dissolved into almost silent giggles.  
'A narwhal has a _tooth_, Shin, but good try. But you two—' theatrically Die swooped between them, looping an arm around each of their waists, 'Look _hot_. So beautiful. Truly. Promise to keep those outfits on and I'll let you run away with me today; we can live in the woods and build a cabin and worship each other endlessly—'  
'Knock it off, Die,' Kyo said grumpily, 'Can we not just get through this?'   
'Toshiya,' Die said declaratively, 'Actually looks like more of a girl than Shinya does.'   
'Shut up.'   
'No really, Shin, I think we _finally_ found your masculine side – ow!'  
'Yeah?' Toshiya challenged, hands on hips, 'Nice lipstick, _Die_.'   
Die grinned back at him. 'Nice _corset_. Kaoru, look—' he grabbed Toshiya by the shoulders and shoved the startled bassist in front of their recently emerged bandleader, who was still frowning and adjusting his clothing, 'Who looks girlier: him or Shinya?'   
There was a terrible, tense silence as Kaoru slowly looked Toshiya up and down. Toshiya bit his darkly painted lower lip, feeling strangely nervous; there was a soft look in the guitarist's eyes that he couldn't ever remember seeing before, and it made him feel uncertain. Gently he shrugged Die's hands off his shoulders. He went to put his hands into his pockets but found he didn't have any, and so instead he just tucked them a little uncomfortably behind his back.  
'Well,' he said at last, awkwardly, 'What do you think?'   
His voice broke the spell: Kaoru's eyes lost that soft look and he looked briefly embarrassed, and then both his gaze and the line of his jaw hardened.   
'I don't know,' he said bluntly, 'You look like a hooker or something, I guess.'   
At that it seemed that Kyo was standing very still, and Shinya was shuffling his feet anxiously, and Die wore a stunned kind of look on his face. None too discreetly, Kyo shot him a withering look and made a small but violent-looking gesture towards him. The three of them turned their attention to the bassist, watching him as apprehensively as they would a grenade that had just come clattering through the window, but to their surprise, all Toshiya did was shrug. It was a strange kind of shrug, and there was an odd little smile on his face, too, like Kaoru had played right into his hands because he'd said nothing more or less than what Toshiya was expecting.  
It made Kaoru feel sort of bad. He folded and unfolded his arms, and he touched Toshiya's shoulder briefly, under the guise of straightening out his sleeve, and then the photographer cleared his throat and they were Dir en Grey again, the professionals.

  
  


The next day was Kaoru's birthday, the 17th. He turned twenty-three, an age that made him antsy: there was a sense of the years abruptly starting to slip away from him, and he was aware of the exceedingly limited time frame in which there was to make a visual rock debut. He knew they were breaking into an industry where ageing is not tolerated, and it made him nervous.  
Toshiya calling him 'old man' didn't exactly help, either.  
He covered his insecurity by throwing a party. Ever mindful of his career, he invited all the bands he considered to be their contemporaries – and some, a little more senior – and collaborated with their management, persuading their tiny label to contact scouts from other, bigger labels, citing their need to outsource their PR and promotion. He talked a good game; he almost convinced himself. He called a band meeting to inform his friends of how absolutely mandatory their presence at the party was, and was both touched and embarrassed by their confusion: Die cocked his head to the side and told him that of course they were going, it was his birthday; they wouldn't miss it.   
'Oh,' was all Kaoru said in response, going a slightly undignified shade of pink. In that moment, Toshiya almost liked him.

  
What actually happened was that, when they arrived at the party, they discovered that it wasn't exactly in honour of Kaoru's birthday any more.  
In the past forty-eight hours, the celebration had become more exclusive. As far as Kaoru could tell, all that meant was that it had changed location, and was now being held at the house of somebody who was apparently very wealthy and very high up in the recording industry – judging by the amount of gold records decorating the walls, anyway – and all of a sudden there was security on the doors and an actual, real-life velvet rope that could be hooked and unhooked just like in the movies; it was their very first industry party, and for a minute it seemed that they wouldn't be on the list. Under a blinding torchlight, their IDs were scrutinised, and Toshiya and Shinya caused some flurry by being underage; Shinya's response was to give the bouncers a solemn, steady gaze, as if trying to control their minds; Toshiya jutted out a hip and lit up a cigarette and gave them a flirtatious look that dared them, just _dared_ them to tell him that he was too young to witness what might be going on beyond the velvet rope.  
It worked, and he was the first through. He only looked back for a moment, giving his bandmates a shy smile, and then he let a gawky, youthful sort of laugh break free from his lips and leant back to grab Shinya's wrist, yanking him in alongside him, and the two of them disappeared into the velvet darkness.

  
  


What Kaoru found surprising was that, no matter how big and fancy the house was and how much money had clearly been thrown around, the party was still just a party; it was still, at its heart, the kind of event that Kaoru had attended in his schooldays, standing with his back against a living room wall and trying vainly to fit in, to make eye contact with somebody who might actually hold a conversation with him. Everything had been scaled up, sure, and nobody was eyeing Kaoru like they weren't sure what exactly he was doing here, but the party was still, at its core, just a series of dark rooms filled with hot and sweating people, and the drink was still just drink, and the drugs were still only drugs. The house was huge but humid and filled with the sounds of screams and laughter and banging doors from different rooms, and in one of the rooms there was an honest-to-god dance floor, a real one, and a grand piano that was being used as a bar top but otherwise ignored; the crowd of sweating dancers were all screaming along loudly (and badly) to Blur's _Country House_ on the stereo system, and at least two women Kaoru could see were wearing Union Jack mini-dresses with platform boots. The air was thick with heat and smoke and perspiration; the surfaces were sticky with spilled drinks and dusted with sprays of off-white powders; the floor was littered with cigarette butts and rolling papers and smaller yen notes and torn-off buttons and lost pills, some crushed, some not, and flattened paper cups and the occasional shattered glass and mud from shoes because everybody had worn their shoes inside and luckily, Kaoru hadn't been so dumb as to take his off.   
He realised that he was obsessing, and took a deep breath and placed a hand against a very white wall to steady himself. He'd talked them all into arriving late – he was almost completely sure that was the cool thing to do – and already things were starting to disintegrate here: over by the main staircase a boy with a bloody nose was berating a man in a suit whilst people laughed, and in a dark corner a very glamorously dressed woman was daintily snorting a little cocaine off a man's shoulder and he was – Kaoru's eyes widened – actually _fingering_ her, actually honest-to-god fingering her right there in front of everybody, with his hand tucked up the slit in her skirt. He hastily averted his eyes, but it suddenly seemed that all around him there were clothes getting torn and people falling down in piles, and though he kept calm and stood still his eyes were steadily scanning the perimeter and searching out each individual face that passed him, searching desperately for his friends. He had told them to fan out and talk to as many people as possible, and it seemed that for once they'd obeyed him; still, contrarily, he wanted them back. He felt vulnerable, standing so alone; he felt like he was a teenager again and all the time out of place: there was a kind of desperate frustration to it, a great and wild anger because he wanted somebody to look at him and recognise that he had changed, now, from what he was. Lonely, nerdy Kaoru was a figure of the past, absolutely unrecognisable. He needed somebody to notice this so he could pretend that he believed it.  
Thank god for the music. Whoever was DJing here was obviously either very stupid or very sarcastic: _Country House_ was replaced by Oasis' _Cigarettes and Alcohol_, and that was replaced by The Spice Girls singing _Wannabe_ (which at least explained the mini-dresses, Kaoru reasoned), and then by The Cardigans with _Lovefool_, which was actually pretty popular around that time but drove Kaoru up the wall, which helpfully gave him something other than his unease to focus on. The feeling of irritation that it stirred up within him was pleasantly familiar: it made the party a little more human; a little more _manageable_. It gave him the power to stand not lonely but aloof (the crowd on the dance floor were rapturously screaming _love me, love me, say that you love me_), and not desperate but superior (nobody really seemed to know how to dance to the bits between the chorus and the verses), and he held onto that little itch of annoyance because, when he felt so stupidly lost, (one girl clambered drunkenly up on top of the piano and fell off again almost straight away) he knew the only thing that he could possibly do was focus every single fibre of his being on feigning the exact opposite.   
Irritation, he realised was the key. The feeling of being so _above_ it all – being, quite possibly, cooler – was intoxicating.  
Irritation. He smiled to himself. He knew _exactly_ who he needed to find.

  
  


That was the thought he had on first arriving to the party; two hours later, his hairline was damp with sweat, he smelled like booze even though he hadn't touched a drop and, contrary right up to the fucking end, Toshiya seemed to have vanished into thin air.   
And what sort of utter maniac owned a house like this? The place was full of turns and corners, spidery and so disorienting that he honestly couldn't remember if he was upstairs or downstairs: it was full of fucking staircases and they all seemed to go somewhere different and completely unconnected to the other, and what was the first floor now might have been the basement a few flights of stairs back, and god – fucking – _help_ him, he was lost. Maybe Toshiya was lost too, and that was it. Maybe he was blundering around like an idiot in the darkness, or maybe he'd already given up and gone home. The thought gave Kaoru a little pinch of alarm because, for reasons he was reluctant to examine very closely, he really – he really _needed_ him. The bassist made him furious, sure, but he also made him feel...not exactly invincible, but energised. Toshiya forced him to be bigger, tougher, sharper than he really was. _Better_ than he really was. Or maybe, on second thought, worse. But _different_, at least.  
Kaoru's outstretched fingertips brushed glass, and he was so relieved to have found a door so straightforward – inside to outside – that he went straight through it, breathing in the fresh air gratefully and letting the February wind tousle his sweaty hair. Until he was cold, he didn't realise how hot he'd been. Outside there was a swimming pool, the water illuminated by submerged lights and glowing an unnatural shade of turquoise, like a toxic spill. The sound system out here was playing The Cure, _All Cats Are Grey_, and as if the pool was giving off some sort of foul miasma everybody out here was in a state of partial or total collapse, wilted like glamorous flowers around the water's edge, their feet or hair or hands floating in the neon blue. This was where Kaoru finally found Toshiya.  
  
Unlike his swooning companions he was up on his feet, laughing and shivering with bare feet and hot, flushed cheeks, hair damp with sweat, gaze unfocussed and limbs trembling, hands trailing gracefully, his chewed-red lips spouting speech that was hardly more than jittery, lilting birdsong. His eyes were full of light, hectic and feverish, and what was he doing? Holding an audience with a small cluster of dark-suited ex-rockstars and record execs, tripping around them excitedly and trying to remember the words to the song before Robert Smith said them; 'I never thought that I would find myself in bed amongst the stones,' he gabbled triumphantly, and with every step he took he left a small bloody imprint where he must have stepped on some broken glass.  
The men he was talking to – or talking at, at least – sat in a relaxed line by the water's edge, the trousers of their suits rolled up and their feet in the water as though they were at a spa, drinking champagne out of those saucer-shaped glasses that Kaoru had never really seen the point of. They looked very comfortable, and they watched Toshiya as though he was some kind of especially interesting TV show, and they talked amongst themselves.   
And for some reason that made Kaoru feel incredibly anxious.  
'Toshiya,' he blurted, intending to say something that might drag him away, but his voice was too loud in the outdoor stillness and just about every eye turned towards him; old first, young last but Toshiya last of all, twisting slowly and looking politely distracted, still mumbling something sweet but incoherent. His eyes seemed to clear, and he beamed; in a single, easy motion he wrapped his arms around Kaoru as though they were old friends, kissing him blissfully on the forehead. It was like being enveloped by a dying star: the wall of heat that came with his body was incredible. He smelled different, almost chemical, and his voice had broken into a foggy croak that was appealing but unfamiliar. But god, the heat of him. Kaoru felt his clothes immediately start sticking to his skin. He was relieved when Toshiya let him go.  
'Look,' Toshiya urged, gripping Kaoru's hand in his own clammy one and whirling back to his audience to address them, '_This_ is Kaoru, _this_ is the birthday boy, it's _his_ party!'   
His speech was too fast: his words weren't slurred but they ran together uncontrollably.  
'Toshiya,' Kaoru said uneasily, but something in the younger man's face with its huge, glittering, doped smile stopped him. As if in a daydream, Toshiya shook his head. He held out his hands to feel the way his own hair swayed around his face, and his smile widened.  
Like somebody possessed he pulled his T-shirt off over his head. He loosened his belt, and stepped out of his pants. His eyes were wide, twin diamonds, and Kaoru watched in a daze as he hooked his fingers inside the waist of his boxer briefs and, in one easy, fluid motion, stripped them off.  
He seemed breathless; he took Kaoru's numb hand in his hot one.   
'C'mon,' he said, 'Swim with me.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on music: late nineties can only mean Britpop! I was six years old in 1998. I had a Spice Girls T-shirt, and this seemed to be around the time that it again became very cool to make the peace sign in photographs. I remember seeing music magazines that were dedicated to the Blur/Oasis rivalry (now that we're all grown-ups we can admit that Blur are better, right?).   
I kind of felt that using this sort of music was not only era-appropriate, but also, I don't know. It was a huge boom for British music, and it was the last days of the music industry's golden, pre-internet piracy age. I kind of imagine that these VK bands suddenly blowing up probably had much the same feeling to it...like the record industry was sitting on a goldmine. So it felt comparable.


	6. Chapter 6

In its own way, Kaoru thought, it was really beautiful. Drops of water hung suspended and shimmering in the air, caught in the glow of the party lights; the night was cold and the pool was heated and steam rose off it in great billows, thick as cloud, softly and slowly revolving and bright as confetti, flowing dreamily upward into the night. Through it, the surface of the water was disturbed. Kaoru searched it and caught a glimpse of Toshiya as a flash of white skin below the water, a dark cloud of hair streaming out behind him; he watched as his bandmate broke the surface of the pool, smiling and giggling breathlessly and blinking water from his eyes. He watched as the men around the pool watched. From inside there came a raucous cheer, completely unrelated to anything going on outside the dark and humid confines of the house, and Kaoru thumbed at his forehead agitatedly, feeling a headache start behind his eyes. The DJ was having a schizophrenic turn: _All Cats Are Grey_ had been replaced by Hole screeching _Pretty On The Inside_. He wondered if that was why so many of the voices leaking from inside had taken on such a confused, belligerent tone.   
'You're not angry, are you?' Toshiya asked, suddenly treading water in front of him, and Kaoru shrugged.  
'You're doing what I asked you all to do,' he said, nodding as subtly as he could at Toshiya's dark-suited fanclub, 'They're important. You've got their attention. I assume you've talked about the band at least a bit.'   
Toshiya laughed, accidentally swallowing quite a lot of pool water, which made him grimace: the water seemed to have sobered him up slightly, though his fingers still traced the lights that played on its surface as if mesmerised.   
'Yeah. I just thought you'd be angry.'

  
  


It was a fair enough assumption. Kaoru was quite often angry, at least where Toshiya was concerned, and truthfully, when Kaoru had first seen him tottering around by the water, his first emotion _had_ been a little stab of fury: not exactly at Toshiya but just at the unfairness of it all, that he could fit in so well here, carve out such a weird but natural niche for himself. He felt jealous of his bandmate's charisma, his charm, his magnetism; felt jealous of the way that he didn't even have to try, and when he'd seen the looks on the faces of Toshiya's enraptured little audience, he'd felt a different kind of anger altogether: a hopeless kind of rage, a stilted, confusing frustration.  
'Are you drunk?' Kaoru asked now, trying to divert both of their attentions; Toshiya was huddled in the water and looking up at him very sweetly.  
'Yeah, I've been drunk,' Toshiya replied, and a nervous, mirthless laugh juddered from his throat, 'I'm sort of on everything. I've taken quite a bit. D'you think that's all right?'  
'No idea,' Kaoru answered honestly. 'Do you feel all right?'  
Toshiya thought hard about that. 'Yes,' he said at last, decisively. Momentarily distracted he twisted in the water, letting his long wet hair fan out around him.  
'Is this what you pictured, for your birthday?'   
'Yeah. I guess. This is sort of how I pictured my _life_. I guess.'   
'So you're happy, right?'  
'Who are those guys, anyway?'  
'Oh, them?' Toshiya sunk his shoulders and head under the water briefly, blowing bubbles. He resurfaced and swiped the water from his face, letting it trickle from his fingertips. There seemed to be some sort of coup being attempted for control of the stereo system inside: Hole came to an unceremonious halt and there was a period of conspicuous silence before – Kaoru couldn't believe it – _Islands in the Stream_ started up. Was this song _stalking_ him, or something? As it was he couldn't hear it without feeling as though he was pinned in place once again by Kyo's steady, haunted, just-slightly-insane gaze.  
'Aren't you coming in?'  
'Huh?' Kaoru felt how stupid the expression on his face was and forced his mouth closed.  
'To the water,' Toshiya laughed, and then gave him a challenging sort of smile. 'You _want_ people to talk about you, don't you?'  
'I hate Dolly Parton,' Kaoru muttered to himself.  
'Don't you want them to wonder about us? We'll be those two naked boys in the pool. And over the years the legend will get all tangled up, and nobody will be able to agree on who we actually were, whether we were Toshiya and Kaoru or if maybe we were somebody's pair of assistants or if we were statues who came to life or nymphs...'  
His shoulders were out of the water now, Kaoru noticed, breaking out in goosebumps although he didn't seem to notice the cold. He reached up, his hand dripping golden; his smile had slipped away.  
'Come in,' he whispered.  
'Toshiya—'  
'Hey, Toshiya! Come over here, have some more wine with us!'  
They both turned; Kaoru sharply, as if jerked out of a daydream, Toshiya more slowly, haloed by a dense aura of shimmering vapour, already magnificent. The men sitting at the other end of the pool were growing rowdy, banging their glasses against the expensive stone they sat upon; when they got his attention they started to hoot and holler and Kaoru watched as Toshiya's face changed in an instant – grew lighter, more luminous, laughing already even though there wasn't anything to laugh at. He glanced back at Kaoru, one single glance, something in his expression Kaoru couldn't quite read, and then he shrugged lightly and ducked back under, streaming away through the water to join them.   
  
Slowly, wearily, Kaoru got to his feet and stretched. He very much wanted to leave, but he felt distinctly uneasy about abandoning his bassist with this crowd of strange men, crowlike in their dark suits: he knew, in his heart, that he couldn't do it. Something in the way that they were looking at Toshiya just seemed so sinister, like they didn't really care what happened. Kaoru eyed them narrowly: they had acquired another bottle of champagne and were in the act of upending it over Toshiya's face to make him lap at it as it fizzed and frothed golden around him. They were laughing, but – no, that was it; they were laughing _at_ him, not with him. Like he was all some big joke. They were watching him like people watch monkeys at the zoo, just waiting for them to do something human.  
Kaoru sighed and took off his shoes, resigning himself to being just another spectator; his footfalls had no echo as he circled the pool and climbed up the metal steps to the diving board, sitting down carefully at the end. It was at just the right height for him to swirl his feet in the water, which felt almost uncomfortably warm against his chilled skin; from where he sat he could see everything. He could see the high privacy walls that bordered this floodlit and perfectly manicured garden; he could see the trees planted in a border and the high-rises beyond them; he could see the party detritus of empty bottles and lipstick-smeared glasses and cigarette ends, and most importantly he could see the men hunched like birds of prey, cheering and cawing as they goaded Toshiya on. He could see them as they counted the number of somersaults he could turn and made him do handstands on the bottom of the pool, cheering at the sight of his long, lean legs in the empty air.  
Kaoru watched for a few minutes, and then closed his eyes. Against the darkness on the backs of their lids, he could still see Toshiya looking up at him, beads of water clinging to his eyelashes; he could still see the sweet look on his face and his body light and lithe beneath the water, shimmering and twisting and floating. Golden.  
He fell asleep there and didn't awaken until a pale and cold dawn, when the party was over and his bandmates were nudging him awake under the spreading light.  
'We found you!' Die proclaimed loudly, obviously still drunk, grinning a stupid grin, 'I guess _old_ men need their naps, right?'  
'Shut up,' Kaoru mumbled groggily, rubbing at the back of his neck where it ached. His tired eyes searched the circle of faces around him for Toshiya's and found it there, wan and unsmiling now, sleepy-looking and chastened. He was fully dressed, and Kaoru might have believed that he'd dreamt the whole weird swimming pool bit up if it hadn't been for the slight dampness that still clung to Toshiya's hair, weighing it down and making him shiver in the February wind.  
'Hey,' Kaoru said awkwardly, clambering off the diving board, 'What happened to you?'  
But his bassist wasn't looking at him, and his vocalist was yawning and tugging at his sleeve, and there were no buses running at that early hour and so they each took a cold walk home.

  
  


It was weird, but in the weeks after the party, Toshiya found that he couldn't sleep.  
He considered going to Kaoru, given their fragile new truce; he knew that their guitarist had suffered his fair share of insomnia and might have some helpful tips to remedy it (he didn't), but he also knew that Kaoru would want to needle at him, would want him to explain himself and talk it out and get to the root of them problem, which was a place Toshiya very, very definitely did not want to go to. Instead, he tried Kyo – mostly because he knew that the strange, short man wouldn't ask him any questions at all – and the vocalist delivered magnificently, sending him home with a pocket stuffed full of two-toned, blue-and-red pills absolutely guaranteed to completely knock him the fuck out, or your money back. That wasn't exactly ideal either, though: he took one of them at eight in the evening, not expecting much, and then had no memory of how he made it home. He simply awoke very abruptly at around noon the next day, a whole list of missed calls on his mobile phone, feeling like he'd been bludgeoned around the head. He tucked the remainder of the pills inside a sock that had lost its mate somewhere in the laundry and then shoved them at the very back of his underwear drawer, although he was optimistic enough to believe that there was no situation that would ever make him want to take them again.   
But after that, he went back to the no sleep. And when he did sleep he dreamt of crows pecking at him, and of his teeth growing loose and falling out one by one on stage, and of his face in the mirror but without features, just a blank white oval without any eyes or nose or mouth.  
After that one, he decided that it was probably time he talked to Kaoru.

  
  


He picked a bright afternoon in March, just about ten days before his birthday. Already the weather felt like spring, and Toshiya was glad because that meant that his long, homesick winter was finally, _finally_ fucking over. He selected a time, of course, when he and Kaoru were alone; strangely, now, they chose to work that way quite a lot – sitting on opposite sides of the room with their instruments in their laps and a dozen sheets of paper fluttering before them: they didn't talk much as they worked, but their silence was companionable, and for some reason that neither one of them could fathom, those hours became their most productive time. It was something to look forward to fondly, Toshiya thought: those golden-lit afternoons and evenings, when everything just sort of went right. He liked them.  
The afternoon he chose was a Tuesday and there was sunlight splashed across the wooden floor of the studio, weak and watery; Toshiya was curled up on the sofa with his bass propped in his lap and Kaoru was working away contentedly on the floor, a pair of headphones propped over his ears and his guitar resting on his crossed legs. He was sort of weird to watch and listen to, because he had his electric guitar plugged into an amp and the amp hooked up to his headphones, so all Toshiya could hear was the click of his fingertips on the strings and the slide of his hand over the frets. Occasionally he stopped and asked Toshiya a question, or yanked out the headphone jack and played something that he wanted Toshiya's opinion on, but mostly he just kept to himself. Usually whilst he did this Toshiya would have been plucking out different bass lines over and over, experimenting with the arrangements his bandmates had handed him – he liked to look at the music and see if he could guess, just by the sound of it, who had written it. He was nearly always right; it was nearly always Kaoru.   
On that afternoon, though, Toshiya thumbed through the sheet music in front of him and let his bass hang from his neck uselessly, like a piece of oversized jewellery, and after a few minutes of silence Kaoru looked up, smiling in a puzzled sort of way that made Toshiya feel anxious.  
'Everything all right?' the guitarist asked politely.  
'Yeah, of course,' Toshiya reassured him, twining a lock of hair so tightly around his finger that the tip started to turn purple. 'Can we talk, though?'  
Kaoru hesitated and Toshiya felt a welcome surge of irritation cut through his nerves.   
'It's important,' he said. 'It's about the party.'  
Kaoru didn't say anything, but he put his pencil down and waited.

  
  


It was ironic that, despite how many times Toshiya had rehearsed his little speech in his head, he lost sight of the whole thing as soon as he got the opportunity to present it.   
In front of him Kaoru quirked an impatient eyebrow, his gaze travelling to and from his guitar pointedly.  
'I sort of have a bit to do, so—'  
'Those men around the pool with me,' Toshiya broke in clumsily, 'You didn't like them, did you?'  
Surprisingly, Kaoru's face coloured, and he gave an awkward shrug.  
'Yeah. No. They were creeps,' he said uncomfortably.  
'Right,' Toshiya agreed a little breathlessly, tugging on his hair in the way he always did when he was nervous, 'For a while after you fell asleep, we were kind of – just hanging out. We did a few lines, and every time I started to come down, they bumped me up again, only then it started to get really late – or, you know, early, or whatever – so I started to say no, and when I got my head straight, I realised how cold I was. Like, _really_ cold,' he added, laughing anxiously, a skittery sound that seemed to buzz irritatingly around Kaoru's ears. 'So I got out of the pool, or I wanted to get out, but they took my clothes. Like a game or something. But...'   
Kaoru was sitting very still, Toshiya noticed. It didn't make him feel any less nervous.  
'Anyway,' he plunged on, 'I was getting sort of – worked up, I guess, because I was really cold and, you know, I wouldn't have _done that _– wouldn't have taken my clothes off or anything – if I'd been sober.'  
Here he shot a brief pleading look at Kaoru, as if begging him to believe him.   
'So I was starting to feel sort of, I don't know, sort of _nasty_, and I was about to wake you up, but then the guy whose _house_ it was came outside.'  
'Who,' Kaoru said instantly, his dark eyes fixed and a look on his face like he was about to start taking down names, and Toshiya grinned sheepishly even though under his smile there was something shaky and unsettled, like a glass of water that was too full, sloshing around and about to spill. He gave his hair a yank that was hard enough to make his eyes prick with tears.   
'Yoshiki,' he said softly, still smiling in that strange strained way, '_The_ Yoshiki, Kaoru, can you believe it? He was _nice_, as well; he came out with a towel for me, and a dressing gown kind of thing, you know, like you get at the onsen. He sent the others packing – one of them was Dynamite Tommy, did you know that? I didn't even recognise him.' He paused for breath. 'Anyway, Yoshiki took me upstairs to get warm, and we talked.' He snorted a sad sort of laugh, 'I guess he wanted to know why I was naked in his pool, but I told him all about the band and everything, and he was really interested.' Toshiya slid his thumb against his lips and absently started to gnaw on the nail. 'He wants to produce some tracks for us. You know, under his label.'  
'_What_?'  
Kaoru still had that struck-dumb expression on his face, but his whole posture had changed; his back had straightened, he'd let his guitar slip off his lap; as Toshiya watched, the smile that Kaoru couldn't quite fight against began to curl around his lips, 'Toshiya, that's – _incredible_! Why didn't you _tell_ us all; why didn't you tell me sooner? Toshiya, that's – this is – he can make our _careers_, don't you see that? This is our – this is our fucking _break_, Toshiya!'  
'Of course,' Toshiya said brightly, but chewed away on his thumbnail, 'Yeah, I know. It's really good.'   
He tried to sound cheerful, but something wavered in his voice. A small frown quirked Kaoru's forehead, and slowly, he sat back.   
'How...' he cleared his throat, gave his head a gentle shake, 'How did you – arrange that? He's got to be the busiest person I know of.'   
And then suddenly, weirdly, Kaoru wanted to take that question back; he didn't want to know the answer. He felt like plugging up his ears and shouting at the top of his lungs to blot out Toshiya's voice; he felt like walking out of the studio and leaving everything there, on that dizzying high: The Day That Everything Changed.  
But Toshiya gave him a miserable little smile that he couldn't look away from, and he sat frozen to the spot, watching the bassist shrug sadly.   
'It's obvious, isn't it?' Toshiya said quietly. 'I told him I'd do anything.'


	7. Chapter 7

For a moment, Kaoru sat completely still. His guitar was still lying half-on and half-off his lap where he'd loosened his grip on it, and he was still squinting into the sun with the same stupid, hopeful smile on his face, only the longer Toshiya looked at him, the more that smile seemed to be turning into a kind of grimace, painful and strained.  
'I don't understand,' Kaoru said at last, declaratively.  
He looked small, all hunched over down there in his little patch of sunlight. Small and – well, _nerdy_, with his glasses on and his hair falling like it was, one huge chunk of it still caught inside the neck of his old, faded T-shirt, making him look uneven. Toshiya fixed his firmly on a point just slightly above the top of Kaoru's head.  
'Don't make me spell it out,' he said. It was amazing how faintly his voice came out, even in his own ears. Kaoru frowned.  
'What?' he said inelegantly.  
'I said—' Toshiya cleared his throat lamely, 'I said – don't make me spell it _out_. Please.'  
And it was funny, but it suddenly struck Kaoru what a harsh, hostile environment their studio was in the sunlight. It had been such a long and dull winter that he'd never experienced it like this, with its every sharp plane glinting like this, like a blade. In the sun the windows glittered blindingly, shutting out the sky like a one-way mirror; the studio seemed full of machinery and shelving and bare floors, all those scalding scrubbed-raw surfaces, like bones in the desert. Picked clean, like something that had been dead for years.  
Carefully, Kaoru set his guitar back in its case and stood up. When he closed his eyes the sunlight shone through the blood vessels in his eyelids and turned his vision red. He didn't seem to know what to do with himself; he stood in place uncertainly for a moment, watched by Toshiya's wide and anxious eyes. He made to turn his back and cross to a window, but the bright white expanse of it put him off and he turned, half-blind. He stooped to pick up his jacket where he'd cast it off earlier.  
'Wait,' Toshiya said quickly, his voice sort of unstable, like it was about to trip over the edge, 'Where are you going?'  
'Outside,' Kaoru said shortly.  
'Okay,' Toshiya said, getting hastily to his feet and fighting to disentangle himself from his bass, 'Okay. Hang on a second. We can—'  
'You stay here.'  
'But – I'll come with you—'  
'Just stay _here_, Toshiya,' Kaoru repeated, his voice so hard that Toshiya jumped.  
'But why?'  
He was still laying his bass flat in its case, not even bothering to unhook its shoulder strap, and with a dim flare of rage Kaoru watched as he shrugged his sweater on and made to stand up.  
'You really want to know?' he asked, just barely polite. His mouth was set in a grim, straight line, but his body language as he stood was composed, reasonable; the only thing to give him away was the way his hands trembled, just slightly, where they lay against his sides. Anxiously Toshiya nodded and – oh, fuck. Kaoru could feel his heart wanting to soften at the way the bassist looked: his face all pale and pinched and fearful and his hair messy from the way he kept agitatedly tugging on it and yanking his hands through it, standing in the middle of the room so irrelevantly, like a spare part.  
But: 'All right,' he said evenly, 'If you really want to know, I'll tell you. I'm going outside, Toshiya, because I want to be away from you. Because I really think that if I have to stay in this room with you for one more minute, I'm going to hit you.'  
There was a sick-feeling beat of silence. Toshiya looked very white.  
'I've never...' Kaoru huffed a short, mirthless sort of laugh, 'I've never felt this way in all my life. I'm just so, so _sick_ of you. I'm sick of your attitude, and the sight of you, and the way you talk. I just...I _hate_ you.' He shrugged a little loosely. 'I really, really hate you. I never should have taken you on. I shouldn't even have let you audition. I should have thought about the day we first met outside that live house in Nagano, and I should have remembered what a shallow, reckless, arrogant little _boy_ you were.'  
Numbly, shrilly, Toshiya said, 'Stop it.'  
'You stop it. Go home.'  
'Kaoru—'  
'Back to Nagano, I mean. I don't want you in this band any more.'  
  
For a long moment, neither of them said anything. On the wall above the door, the clock ticked. Toshiya could feel his own heartbeat thudding nauseously high in his chest, reverberating through his lips and fingers and making them feel numb; it felt so loud that he wondered if Kaoru would be able to hear it, tapping out the truth of his fear against his breastbone like a message in Morse code. His vision was smeary and unsteady. His breath seemed to rattle in his throat.  
'I'm part of this band,' he said at last, woodenly, 'You can't just throw me out.'  
Kaoru's only response was to shrug. That was somehow worse feeling: like he didn't care either way. He looked tired.  
'Look,' Toshiya said, his voice shaking slightly, 'I don't get this. I said – when I auditioned, I said—'  
'I know what you said.'  
'And you _smiled_!' Toshiya burst, sounding not entirely in control of himself, 'You _smiled_!'  
Kaoru shook his head wearily. 'So?'  
'So,' Toshiya hissed, 'You wanted this. You—'  
'You're basing that on a facial expression I made four months ago?' Kaoru asked incredulously.  
'You _wanted_ it!' Toshiya almost shouted, his hands balling up into angry little fists at his sides, 'And if you're pretending that you didn't, then you're a liar as well as a hypocrite. You weren't going to take me on until I said that; I told you I'd do anything and I saw the look on your face—'  
'I don't care what you think you _saw_—'  
'There were better bassists than me,' Toshiya interrupted hotly, 'Admit it. There were people who you thought were good enough, but you didn't take them because they didn't fit, and you didn't think _I'd_ fit, either. Not until I said that.'  
'You're being mad,' Kaoru said, trying to sound unconcerned, though he looked rattled; Toshiya laughed, a horrible sarcastic sound.  
'You only gave me that audition to _humiliate_ me,' he said heatedly, his teeth clenched, 'You never wanted me; you just wanted to _play_ with me until I said that, and you realised that I was what you'd been looking for. All you cared about was that I could _sort of _play the bass and that I had the same kind of ambition that you did; that I wasn't going to get in your way or cut and run when it got too much—'  
'Yeah, I wanted to know that you were _ambitious_!' Kaoru retorted, his voice rising dangerously, 'Not that you'd go slutting it up for every executive you run into!'  
'Oh, _please_,' Toshiya laughed exasperatedly, his voice a hissing blue flame, 'You were happy enough when we were by the pool – when I was “doing what you asked me to do” and “getting their attention”; you were fine with everything _then_.'  
'Well you didn't _fuck_ any of them,' Kaoru snapped back, his voice lethally quiet.  
'I didn't _fuck_ anyone; it was only a blow—'  
'I don't want to hear about it,' Kaoru interrupted furiously: he could feel himself flushing, the redness fierce on his cheeks, 'You know I actually stuck around that pool to try and _protect_ you, in case they tried anything?'  
'_Protect_ me?' Toshiya repeated disbelievingly, 'Protect me from _what_? What were you trying to save me from? Getting us an amazing opportunity, or giving our band a future, or—'  
'I was trying to protect you from making a really fucking big mistake, actually! From doing something you'd _regret_!'  
'Doesn't feel like such a big mistake to me,' Toshiya taunted, 'It's not like we were getting anywhere else fast.'  
'Ex_cuse_ me?'  
'All I'm saying,' Toshiya said unsteadily, 'Is that maybe if you were a better _leader_, I wouldn't have had to – to do anything.'  
And that was the final straw, for Kaoru. Of all he had taken from the bassist, he simply couldn't take that. A pulse was beating deafeningly in his ears as he grabbed hold of Toshiya's T-shirt at the chest, wrenched a handful of the fabric up around his neck to hold him in place; his whole body felt as though it was burning up with anger and humiliation and he drew back his arm, watched as Toshiya squeezed his eyes shut, drew away—  
And Kaoru released him, not looking at him, shaking out his clenched fist as though it was hurting him.  
Silence, but for Kaoru's unsteady breathing and Toshiya's heart, jumping in his chest. Slowly he smoothed his T-shirt back into place, his hands trembling. Kaoru turned and, without saying another word, walked out of the door and down the staircase to the street.  
  
Within a few steps, Kaoru found he was running. Amazing, incredible; anybody who had known him in high school wouldn't have believed it: shy, scrawny, unathletic Kaoru Niikura racing to beat the devil, his breath coming out harshly and his eyes narrowed into determined little slits, heart almost humming in his chest. Outside it was bright but cool. The air smelled flinty, sooty, and a few of the trees that lined the street were starting to come into bud, their green leaves waxy looking and unreal.  
He wanted distance between them, _needed_ it even, but Toshiya was all over him. He was in the sharp stitch that stuck jagged into Kaoru's ribcage, just below his heart; he was in the frightened rabbit jump of his pulse, all skittery energy, all just-barely-contained disaster; he was in the half-formed, nightmarish thoughts that flashed through Kaoru's head. He passed somebody smoking and the smoke was like _his_, strong and blue and foreign; he skidded to a halt, gasping for breath, his heartbeat sounding off like an alarm in his ears.  
He couldn't afford it, but when a taxi came driving by him, he hailed it and slid into the back seat. Just like in a movie. The cab smelled like fabric deodoriser, and the radio was playing quietly up in front.  
He closed his eyes and let his head lean against the window. The glass was cold and felt good against his hot, tight skin.  
Toshiya in his head kept shifting, changing: his mocking, sarcastic face with the colour high in its cheeks kept blending and blurring into the stunned, quiet Toshiya with a white face and huge, still eyes, which melted like wax into the Toshiya that had looked up at him from Yoshiki's stupid sky-blue swimming pool, blinking away water droplets with a wide, breathless smile on his face, which twisted in turn to its final, most horrible form: Toshiya with his face screwed up, waiting for Kaoru to hit him.  
They'd been close enough for Kaoru to see the pulse leaping in his throat and hear the high, frightened note of his breathing. He could have counted his eyelashes. Faint, bluish blood vessels had been visible in his eyelids, like the skin was too thin; they matched the smudges under his eyes. Even before they'd argued, he'd looked pale.  
The cab swayed as they rounded a corner, and Kaoru rubbed at his forehead harshly. He had a weird sense of being a child again, sitting in the back seat like this – being a child and being in trouble, the sort of trouble that felt irreversible, too complicated and tattered and threadbare with pain, like the first time he'd got angry with his mother and told her that he hated her. That had felt like this: the huge silence echoing around in his head and the numbness in his arms and legs and face, the feeling like he'd fucked something up forever.  
Suppose Toshiya left?  
Suppose he took Kaoru at his word and actually left; how on earth were they supposed to replace him if he went? They'd lose all the time they'd spent getting the band to sound right together, they'd lose the songs he'd written, they'd lose – well, they'd lose the deal he'd struck with Yoshiki, for a start.  
Even thinking that made Kaoru feel so ashamed that he almost couldn't stand it. _Hypocrite_: hadn't that been what Toshiya had called him?

  
The worst part, though, was that they'd lose _him_ as well. Toshiya was infuriating and exasperating and actually downright _enraging_ sometimes, but he was also weird, and funny, and sort of fun to be around and to watch. And he was good on stage, energetic and open, and Die got on well with him and Shinya was fond of him and even Kyo seemed reasonably happy to tolerate him. And even – even Kaoru would miss him, if he left. He would miss him more than he could really wrap his head around. Toshiya pissed him off most of the time, but there were other moments – _rare_ ones, but still – when they found themselves unexpectedly able to relax around each other. At times like that, there was nobody else Kaoru would have rather been around. Maybe it was because they were at odds with each other so much of the time, but it just felt nice, having Toshiya smile at him and being able to make the bassist laugh. It made him feel good. Powerful, almost. Like he was the funniest, coolest person in the world.  
But anyway, more importantly than that, Toshiya _pushed_ him. He prodded him forward and forced him to succeed, goaded him into setting his personal goalposts further and further back until he couldn't possibly by satisfied with anything but the best; anything but _perfection_.  
He had a sudden impression of when he'd seen Toshiya and Die horsing around, nervous by the side of the stage, laughing together; he'd come up behind them and he didn't even know the context, but they'd been joking around and then Toshiya had laid his head on Die's shoulder and said, smiling, _oh yeah, all I want is everything_.  
  
Neither one of them got much sleep that night. Toshiya had a weird sort of bruised feeling in his chest, as though he was bleeding on the inside; he spun out his time in the studio for as long as he possibly could, even though he didn't have much to finish up and he couldn't have composed something new if his life had depended in it; his head was just too full up with other things. At nine o'clock or so he went down the street to the nearest convenience store and bought their most expensive onigiri and their least expensive whisky, but instead of going home with it he took his little carrier bag back up to the studio with him and curled up into a little ball on the sofa. He ate the rice balls without tasting them and drank the whisky straight from the bottle in wincing little sips. He felt sick and shaky and weak, like he'd just run a marathon, even though all he'd done was go downstairs and come back up again.  
The heating wasn't on, but there was still a blanket leftover from the winter, when the heating hadn't made much difference anyway. He wished there was a TV or a radio, something to drown out some of the noise in his head, but there was nothing. His cellphone still had more than half its battery left, but he hesitated before tapping out a brief text: _I told the rest of the band today. They're all really happy._  
He sent it to Yoshiki's number and pulled the blanket over him, up to his chin. The reply came relatively quickly: _great news. We'll have to schedule in a meeting to discuss. What are you wearing?  
_Toshiya shut his eyes briefly. _I'm in the studio_, he wrote back.  
_I'll send a car for you._  
Toshiya took a few more quick sips from his bottle, bigger ones this time. There was a tightness in his throat and chest, a stinging feeling behind his nose and eyes, like he was about to cry. He sniffed harshly.  
_Okay_, he typed,_ see you soon._  
  
The next day was a fraught, fragile-feeling one. Kaoru was relieved when the sun finally came up and he had an excuse to get out bed and stop his dismal attempts at sleeping; still, as he showered and forced down a cup of black coffee, he felt horribly jittery and spidery inside, as though his vital organs were all trying to wriggle away from each other. He didn't really want to go to the studio, today. In fact, he felt much, much more like doing what he'd done in Kobe again: like it might be easier to just run away, and start a new band somewhere else. He could try Tokyo, this time. He was bound to come up with a good group of people there.  
But of course, at the appropriate time he found himself putting on his jacket and shoes, and swinging his rucksack over his shoulder. He trudged down to the bus stop as normal, and when his bus arrived, he sat down quietly and let the doors fold closed and trap him inside. It wasn't much more than a ten-minute journey to the studio.  
And of course, it turned out that he had worried for nothing. Toshiya arrived at the studio just a little later than his usual time, and though he looked tired and drawn and suspiciously red-eyed he didn't mention the fight at all, and so Kaoru didn't either. They greeted each other neutrally, as if embarrassed, and Toshiya gave Kaoru just the briefest of fearful glances before sharing his good news with the rest of the band.  
They all acted so delighted; so grateful. They didn't ask any of the questions that Kaoru had. Die started up an irritating, excitable chant, '_we're gonna be ri-ich, we're gonna be fa-mous'_, and Kyo joined in with him, which made it weird and tribal-sounding, and Shinya couldn't seem to stop delightedly laughing.  
When Toshiya tried to meet his eye, Kaoru had to turn away. The feeling of wanting to punch something was back, stronger than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted this whilst working on chapter 15, but I'm a bit drunk, so I can't wait until tomorrow morning, when I take a look at chapter 15 and realise that it is, actually, pure crap. 
> 
> In other news, thanks everyone who has commented! You are all babes.


	8. Chapter 8

Toshiya sat in the recording booth, a pair of overlarge headphones propped carelessly over his ears, and stared blankly into the glass-panelled control room. Inside he could see Yoshiki flitting around the equipment, adjusting a dial here and a switch there, and he watched listlessly: his bass was in his lap and his fingers were on the strings, and ostensibly he was waiting to be told that he could begin, but realistically he was starting to feel like it was outrageous for anybody to expect him to play anything, because he had, in fact, completely forgotten how. His mind felt entirely blank, as though it had been soaked clean.   
His gaze slipped away from Yoshiki's precise, flowing movements to where Kaoru sat, another clear shape behind the glass, his face focussed and set. His eyes were directed straight downwards towards the DAW and he was nodding in response to something Yoshiki had just said to him, the back of his neck tight with tension.   
He remembered the photo shoot they'd had to do on Kyo's birthday, which felt like it had happened a million years ago, now. Die and Shinya had been put together and he and Kaoru had been put together, which had made him feel uneasy, although he wasn't exactly sure why. Or, no, he'd _thought_ he'd known why: he'd thought it was because of what Kaoru had said to him, about him looking like a hooker, but it hadn't been that at all. When they got down to taking the actual pictures, the photographer had explained the poses: Kaoru lying down on his back, and Toshiya positioned over the top of him. It hadn't really seemed like a big deal; they'd each resolved to be as casual and professional as possible about it (especially after Die and Shinya's shoot; Die had held everything up because he kept sniggering), and Toshiya's biggest concern starting out had actually been keeping his balance; he could imagine that it wouldn't go down too well with Kaoru if he actually fell on top of him.   
But then they'd got into position, and it had all felt – _strange_. Wrong, sort of. Toshiya had come over all shy and clumsy and Kaoru had set his jaw in the way he did when he was getting frustrated, and in the resulting photographs Kaoru was the only one of their two who had managed to make eye contract with the camera; in all the pictures Toshiya was looking at him, or looking down, which the photographer eventually decided was good because it made him look mysterious, or demure, or something.   
But he'd been acutely aware of every single place where his body was touching Kaoru's; his knee against the guitarist's thigh, his wrist alongside Kaoru's waist, Kaoru's hand – placed by the photographer, as they were both inanimate objects – on Toshiya's neck. They hadn't looked at each other, but Toshiya could feel the warmth of his body, and it had – affected him, somehow. It had embarrassed him. He'd spent the whole shoot trying to steady not only his balance but his breathing, and every image that came out Toshiya looked, to his own eye, anxious and ill-at-ease. And Kaoru, _Kaoru_ had looked—  
Well, pissed off, in some of them. There was no getting around that. But in others he'd been calm, dreamy almost; and in every single shot, even though he was lying underneath Toshiya, he was propped up on one elbow, or half-sitting, or pushing back against him. In every single frame, he looked like he was the one in control.   
And when Toshiya had realised that, it had sent a deep heat all the way through his body.  
After that, it had seemed that Kaoru had started occupying his thoughts more and more. He would come into Toshiya's head at horribly inopportune moments, like when he was touching himself, and though on those occasions he always stopped – he didn't want to do that with Kaoru in his head; it'd be wrong – it made him uncomfortable. He knew that Kaoru would hate him if he knew; even more than he did already.   
  
It wasn't that things were _so_ bad. Kaoru at least talked to him now; before, he had frozen him out for months. Things had looked as though they might start getting better towards the end of the year, but then they were all invited over to Yoshiki's house to celebrate New Year's Eve 1998, and whatever truce they had started upon had simply slipped away again. Then Yoshiki had started actually working with them, and now...  
Now it was almost as if their slate had been entirely wiped clean, and they had regressed beyond even those first spiky, hurt feelings: Kaoru was unfailingly civil but also cool, as if Toshiya was some dim acquaintance he had little desire to ever get to know better. There had been some horrible moments earlier on – after a long, hard day of work Toshiya had grabbed Kaoru's arm as he was leaving the studio, desperate to try and get him to at least have a conversation about everything, and Kaoru had turned around and hissed into his bandmate's tired, sweaty face that he should go and take a shower before he went hitting the sheets again; _that_ had stuck with him – but they'd mostly cooled off, now. Everything was _so_ cool between them, in fact, that it felt frozen.  
Behind the glass, Kaoru was discussing some important matter with their temporary producer. Next to him, Kyo sat hunched over in rapt study of some dog-eared paperback novel; in the darkness of the control room, his little face was as white as a knuckle. He glanced up and caught Toshiya's eye, and his gaze was one of perfect discomfort: he could have his moments of being weirdly, sharply perceptive, and it was clear from his expression that he'd picked up on Kaoru's intense hatred for Yoshiki just as clearly as Yoshiki had.   
Deftly he marked his place and slid out of his chair, a small roving shadow in the dimness as he crossed to the door connecting the control room to the sound booth; neither Kaoru nor Yoshiki noticed a thing, embroiled in discussion as they were, and Toshiya watched as Kyo opened the door and poked just his head around. He smiled ruefully at Toshiya from the doorway of a brighter world.  
'They'll be at it for a while,' Kyo said bluntly, 'They can't agree on anything.'   
Toshiya nodded, tried to smile; Kyo slipped all the way through the door and hovered next to him awkwardly, and after a few moments of silence, gave him a clumsy pat on the shoulder.   
Toshiya ducked his head and smiled down at the floor as hard as possible so that he wouldn't cry.   
'They are doing,' Kyo muttered succinctly, 'My fucking head in. I'd rather shit a porcupine than listen to any more of that.'   
Toshiya snorted, a half-cry, half-laugh sound.   
'What's your book about?' he asked when he had himself under control, a tone of forced gaiety in his voice: he felt almost amused at how little he cared.   
'Oh.' Kyo frowned at the front cover of his book, as if he hadn't just been reading it, 'It's about a Catholic priest living in Mexico during the 1930s, when Catholicism was outlawed.'   
Toshiya blinked, a little taken aback. 'Oh.'   
'Yeah. I think the author really hates Mexico.'   
'Right. Did that actually happen?'  
'What?'  
'Did they really ban Catholics in Mexico?'  
'Yes.' Kyo frowned at him. 'Didn't you ever have to read _Silence_ in school?'   
'Yes,' Toshiya responded a little irritably, wanting a cigarette, 'But since _Silence_ is set in Japan, I don't see the connection.'   
'They were contemporaries.'   
'Who? Mexico and Japan?'  
'Shusaku Endo and Graham Greene. Just forget it.'   
'Will do,' Toshiya said, and Kyo gave him a sharp, close look.   
'What's up with you, anyway?' he asked rudely, and Toshiya hesitated. His hands felt completely numb on his strings, and he couldn't figure out where even to _start_ answering Kyo's question. It felt much too dramatic to say 'everything.'   
'Nothing,' he said instead, lamely. 'Just tired.'   
'Bullshit,' Kyo said neatly, but at that moment Yoshiki's artificially magnified voice boomed into the sound booth: 'Kyo, could you come out? We'll be starting soon.'   
'_Hang on_,' Kyo said, his voice razor-sharp, and narrowed his eyes at Toshiya. 'Well?'  
Toshiya swallowed.  
Kaoru had made him feel at home; that was it. That was why he was so bereft. No matter how much they had argued they had always managed to be, in some strange and undefinable way – _close_. It was as if those two uncomfortable opposites, the friction between them and the forced friendship required of them, had somehow fast-tracked them through what might have been years of getting to know each other, of discovering all the dark parts and the bad sides, the secrets and the insecurities: they had tidily gotten that out of the way – like cleaning something up. Until all that remained were the things that glittered.  
But they were gone. And Toshiya was by himself again.  
'Really,' he muttered, 'It's nothing.'   
'Kyo, if you could step out, please. We're ready.'   
Toshiya swallowed again, past the huge lump that had formed itself in his throat, and positioned his fingers on the strings.   
'Toshiya?' Yoshiki's voice was very calm. 'We're ready for you now. Toshiya? Toshiya?'  
And as Toshiya stood vacantly in the middle of the sound booth, watching Kaoru refusing to look at him, Yoshiki waited and then finally gave up, and turned it all off, because Toshiya was wasting tape.

  
  


Perhaps it was because of Kaoru's animosity and perhaps it was because of Toshiya's obvious discomfort, but when their album was finally ready, it wasn't exactly a joyful occasion.  
More than anything, they felt tired. They that preceded the release of _Gauze_ with so many singles taken from it that the album felt old to them already, and now that it was in shops there was suddenly a lot more tedious work to be done: interviews, press conferences, photo shoots. To Toshiya it felt like he was in some kind of inescapable vehicle, thundering along a highway with no way to stop; no way to get out.  
He wondered if he was really cut out for such a bizarre life. He dyed his hair back to black and cut it short and shiny, as per management request; he put on the clothes they gave him and stood and turned whilst the various outfits were discussed, and Kaoru sent him back to change again and again and again.  
'Look,' Toshiya said exasperatedly, tired of yanking the same three shirts on and off over his head, 'Is there something _specifically_ wrong, or is this just some kind of weird _hobby_ for you?'  
As soon as the words had slipped out he felt horrified, like he'd made a terrible mistake – but he couldn't miss it: the surprised, weirdly pleased look that flickered over Kaoru's face. The corners of his mouth quirked, like he wanted to smile, but he fought it and scowled instead.  
'It's your fucking hair,' Kaoru said back irritably, 'I don't know why you fucking cut it like that. You don't even fit in with the band any more.'   
'I only cut it like I was told to!'  
'Well, now you'll have to put extensions in.'  
Toshiya bit his lip, feeling his heart skip excitedly in his chest: Kaoru was looking at him, actually _looking_ at him, _properly_, like he used to. Carefully, experimentally, he set his hands on his hips; he felt as though he was playing an old character, and it was surprising how familiar it felt. How much _better_ it felt.  
'Maybe next time,' he said acidly, 'You could decide what look you actually want, before you go saying yes to everything management asks.'   
Kaoru's tired eyes widened with shock, and a delicious thrill ran up Toshiya's spine; just for a second, he could have sworn that they had brightened.  
'Or maybe,' Kaoru retorted, sounding just slightly uncertain – out of practice, almost – 'You could take some actual responsibility, for a change. It's your hair and you are still in this band, even if – even if you couldn't _possibly_ look further from it.'   
Toshiya gave him a look of delighted disgust. 'Bite me,' he sneered, and watched as Kaoru glanced down, just briefly, at his own right palm.   
'Sort your fucking hair out,' he said crossly.  
  


From that point on, there was a fight every day. The air between them crackled with tension and Kaoru could feel it, how electric it was; how it made him feel galvanised, like all the blood had suddenly come rushing back into his veins. They argued over who said more in interviews and who said what in interviews; they bickered over costumes and makeup and hairstyles; they fought over the songs on their current album and the songs for their next album. Kaoru wrote a song that was ten minutes long; Toshiya contributed the bass line and loudly declared that it was the best thing about it. Toshiya wrote a song that Kyo added particularly explicit lyrics to; the entire band sat through a meeting with representatives from their label and from the board of Standards and Censorship in music, and Kaoru blamed Toshiya.   
'I didn't write the lyrics!' he yelled disbelievingly after the meeting was over, jabbing his finger at their vocalist, '_Kyo_ writes the lyrics! Shout at _him_ for once!'   
'Peace,' Kyo mumbled from the corner, stabbing at the buttons on Shinya's tamagotchi. He wrinkled his nose. 'It's dead.'   
'You were the one who suggested those lyrics for that song; he was going to put them in a poetry book, and you know it.'   
'They fit, Kaoru!'  
'Because you wrote the song with those lyrics in mind!'  
'Oh, why don't you fucking _prove_ it?'  
'Oh, what, you're trying to tell me that you wrote in a rap section _on a fucking whim_?'  
'Yeah, maybe I did!'  
'Like it's not bad enough that our bassist looks like a reject Beatle; now apparently we jerk off on walls and freebase coke and wear chastity belts, too.'  
'It's not even possible to jerk off in a chastity belt; that's the whole _point_,' Toshiya said from between clenched teeth, and they glared at each other, jaws and fists clenched. Across the room, a cheerful 8-bit melody bleeped from the device in Kyo's hands, and he sat up straighter.   
'Restarted,' he said, brighter than Toshiya had ever heard him, 'Don't worry so much, Kaoru. I don't think you can even buy chastity belts these days...' he paused, perhaps pondering the question of chastity belt shopping. He was quiet for so long that Die took over, a little uneasily: 'Anyway, it doesn't matter, right? They're going to let us have the lyrics; we just need to change the title a bit.'  
'Come up with a _whole new title_, you mean.'  
Die snorted. 'Just write it backwards and be done with it.'   
Both he and Kaoru looked a little curiously over at Kyo, who just shrugged.  
'_See_?' Toshiya broke in, 'The lyrics are fine, the title's fine and the music's fine, so why don't you just churn out some more for the top ten indies and leave the _innovative_ stuff to me?'  
'You wouldn't know innovation if it flew up your—'  
'I want to use the song that you wrote for some lyrics about child abuse,' Kyo said to Kaoru confidingly, and Kaoru shut his eyes for something longer than a blink. He could tell without looking that Toshiya had one of his hateful smug expressions on his face, and he didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing it.   
'That's fine,' he said, tight-lipped, and as a diversion he picked up the closest piece of paper he had to hand and stared at it intently. As it happened, it was their tour schedule, but Kaoru didn't need it. He already knew it by heart.  
  
They went to Kawasaki, to Amagasaki, to Nagoya. Their home towns were plotted in excited little red dots on their tour map: Kyoto for Kyo, Osaka for Shinya; nothing for Die, he'd grown up too rurally. They played Kobe but bypassed Kaoru's home (just a fancy suburb, a dormer city really, for commuters), which made Toshiya smug until Kaoru pointed out that they were driving straight past whatever mountain hick town _he_ was from, too. Still, as their tiny minivan rattled through a landscape that began to look less like plains and more like mountains, Kaoru found himself getting nervous. Toshiya was giving off the impression of straining at the lead like a dog; he sat with his hand cupped between his eyes and the window, sharpening his view as the scenery began to rise up around them on all sides. They were going to be in Nagano for two nights, and Toshiya hadn't been back in more than two years. Unlike the rest of them, he never talked about home or his family. It annoyed Kaoru because it made him seem mysterious and otherworldly; he wished he'd thought of it first.   
They pulled into their temporary home – a small, quiet, cheap hotel in a suburb of Nagano city – at just gone eleven at night, by which time they were all irritable and stiff and hungry. White-faced from lack of sleep, the five of them looked more like a roving group of ghosts than a band; their schedule was tight and so most of their rest time was spent travelling, rattling endlessly around from one city to the next. They gathered in a pale little group in the lobby to draw their usual straws, seeing who would be bunking up with whom (or, more importantly, seeing who got the coveted private room), and for the first time since the tour had begun, Toshiya and Kaoru ended up together. It wasn't exactly unexpected – they were the last to draw, doing so in a frosty sort of silence – but the air was tense all the same, and when Shinya offered a swap he was very curtly turned down.  
'We're fine, thank you,' Kaoru said stiffly. 'We're adults, aren't we?'  
'Some of us are,' Toshiya muttered.   
It was brushed off, but a ripple of unease went through the group; the various band members eyed each other edgily, but nobody was stupid enough to suggest swapping again.   
'Well,' Die broke in nervously, 'That's good. Maybe this'll be the start of a new, er, golden age of friendship, ha ha ha...' and he laughed awkwardly until Kyo gave him a dirty look and Shinya, none-too-subtly, punched him in the arm. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and then they all slowly started picking up their bags and dragging them upstairs to unpack. Both Toshiya and Kaoru's faces were fixed into matching deep scowls, and they flinched away violently when they accidentally brushed against each other in the corridor.   
Kaoru was aware, though, that under his breath he was making a strange sort of noise – a humming noise, a satisfied noise, not all that dissimilar to a purr.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's weird to be posting these earlier chapter whilst I'm so far ahead. Though, I'm also pleased to be so far ahead, because that means that:  
a) I'll be able to keep up with this every-three-days posting schedule, and  
b) soon I'll be in uncharted territory, which is exciting, and  
c) I'm getting closer to rewriting some of my favourite parts of this
> 
> One thing I've been questioning in this rewrite is British vs American English. I am British (born and raised in London; now I live in the part of the country where everybody sounds like a pirate), but I typically make a few concessions to a wider audience...like 'pants' instead of 'trousers'. However, I'm sure there are quite a few Britishisms slipping through ('lead' instead of 'leash' in this chapter alone). Americans/non-British English speakers among you, does this take you out of the story in any significant way? Am I overthinking things? (When you have to ask this question, the answer is almost always yes.)


	9. Chapter 9

The view from the hotel window wasn't much: a sleepy-looking street with a few blocky, unremarkable buildings, a cluster of power lines and television antennae and then, in the distance, a harder, more rigid darkness than the velvety sky, which was the silhouette of the land rising up to contain the city. The mountains weren't particularly big or impressive-looking from here; Kaoru had been expecting something more dramatic. He spent a polite half a minute taking in the view from the window – the thought came into his mind that this might have been a performance for Toshiya's benefit, but he squashed it – and then got started on his hotel routine: stripping the ugly coverlet off the bed (why were they always so aggressively floral?) and unpacking his overnight case so his clothes were in the wardrobe and his toiletries were in the bathroom and his glasses and contact lens case and his his discman and CDs and his painkillers and his mobile phone and a pack of hair ties were on his bedside table. He counted off these items in his head, let them soothe him; what it came down to, really, was that he didn't like travelling. It was just too hit and miss, too chaotic, too disorderly; it relied on too many unknown variables, outside factors, unpredictable and, worse of all, uncontrollable.   
It wore him out.   
He sighed, rubbing his hands over his face as he sat down on the edge of the bed; he'd taken the one nearest the door. He felt tired and very stiff and weirdly dirty and greasy from a day spent cooped up in the minivan, and he wanted a cigarette but the room had a big no smoking sign plastered to the door.   
As if he was reading his mind, Toshiya said in a low voice: 'Think we can smoke if we do it out the window?'  
_God, yes please_, Kaoru thought vividly, but: 'No, I don't think so,' he said. 'We'll have to go outside.'   
Toshiya sighed loudly, as though this was the greatest injustice that had ever been done to anybody, ever. He'd left his bag right in the middle of the floor, Kaoru noted a little irritably, trailing straps and just waiting to trip somebody up. Toshiya was the kind of person who wouldn't even contemplate unpacking, Kaoru bet, even if he was staying for a whole week. He would be the type to just fish around in his bag for whatever he needed: the sign of a seriously chaotic individual.  
'I'll come with you in a bit, if you want,' Kaoru offered, and Toshiya gave one of his sarcastic little snorts.   
'I think I'll manage, thanks.'  
By a serious effort, Kaoru kept from rolling his eyes. 'Suit yourself.'  
He hesitated. The air in the room felt thick, like something congealed. Toshiya was standing at the window – _not_ smoking, keeping to the rules, but thumbing his cigarette packet distractedly. He was staring through the glass so intently that Kaoru made a little performance of crossing the room to put something down and then pick it up again, just so he could glance back through the window himself and check if there was anything amazing that he had missed, but the view was the same old nothing. And he needn't have bothered with putting on a ruse anyway; Toshiya didn't even seem aware of him.  
'What are you looking at?' Kaoru asked curiously. For a moment it seemed Toshiya hadn't heard him, but after a long moment, infuriatingly, he just shrugged. The expression on his face was a weird one: something like satisfaction, almost, but not a very _happy_ satisfaction. It was disquieting; it made Kaoru want to shiver even though the room was warm.  
'So, is it like you remember?' Kaoru tried, forcing his voice into a pleasant, conversational tone, and bristled when Toshiya gave another loud, grating sigh.  
'Of course it is,' he said, sounding frustrated, like it was the stupidest question he'd ever heard. 'I've only been away a few years, and I didn't even grow _up_ here. Was _Kobe_ different? How come nobody ever asks _you_ questions like that?'  
'Woah.' Kaoru arched an eyebrow, raising his hands as if in defence, 'I don't know. Calm down.'   
Toshiya made a hissing noise between his teeth and ran a hand through his hair. He looked tired, Kaoru thought. 'Don't tell me to calm down,' he said. 'I _am_ calm.'  
He turned back to the window, and for a brief moment, his face looked so incredibly sad and worried and alone that Kaoru actually caught himself reaching out for him.  
The next, he looked so lofty and superior that Kaoru could hardly believe it was the same person, and he let his arms fall back down by his sides, feeling annoyed with himself. He turned resolutely away and yanked his hair out of its ponytail, letting it fan out across his shoulder blades.  
Behind him, Toshiya continued to work his thumb agitatedly over his cigarette packet. He felt pissed off at himself. He'd been so looking forward to arriving but now, suddenly, he could barely stand the thought of spending two whole nights here. He wanted to go home. Back to Osaka, where he didn't even belong – except now it felt like he didn't really belong _here_, either. It wasn't that Nagano had changed, or at least not noticeably. It was more that – in some vague, hard-to-define way – _he_ had changed. He had grown sharper around the edges, he thought ungenerously, tougher and less yielding; he'd always assumed that there had been a space left for him here, but looking at it now, that space seemed laughably small. He really wouldn't fit into it any more.   
So where was home supposed to be, exactly?   
He bit his lip and stared out at the mountains, the landscape of his childhood. They were steeper around where he had grown up, rising up sharply behind their little house; he closed his eyes and took a mental picture of them, tucked it away inside him.   
  
'You want the first shower?'   
'Huh?' Toshiya turned infuriatingly slowly, like a sleepwalker coming out of a dream, and Kaoru fought to squash the irritation that was trying to swell up in his throat.   
'The first shower,' he explained, his voice just slightly clipped, 'We've been travelling all day, so if you're going to carry on spacing out for a bit then I'll go ahead and—'  
'Sure, whatever,' Toshiya mumbled.   
'Sure like you want the first shower, or sure like, I should go ahead and—'  
'For god's _sake_, Kaoru, just do what you want, will you? I don't want to talk to you at the moment.'  
Kaoru gave him an incredulous sort of look. 'Are you gonna actually _tell_ me what's jumped up your ass today, or do you want me to try and guess?'  
'Fuck off. Go fuck yourself.'  
'_Wow_,' Kaoru drawled sarcastically, 'You know, you're wound pretty tight for somebody who's been getting it so regularly.'   
He immediately regretted that. He hesitated, half stepping back, feeling uneasily as though he had gone too far, but Toshiya just gave a rigid sort of shrug.  
'I guess I am,' he said, his voice flat but tense. 'Could you leave me alone now, please?'  
Kaoru ran an uncomfortable hand through his hair. 'Yeah, okay. You're...' he paused, biting at his lower lip, 'You're – _okay_ though, right?'  
Looking incredulous, Toshiya whirled around. He'd squeezed his cigarette packet so tightly that he'd bent the box almost in half; as Kaoru watched he gripped it harder still, his hands shaking terribly, 'Kaoru, _please_. I'm not kidding. _Please_ leave me alone.'  
Even then Kaoru might have responded – protested that he was only trying to be nice – but what stopped him was noticing, suddenly, how very strained Toshiya looked. There were shadows under his eyes as dark as bruises and every one of his nails had been bitten down to the quick; his lower lip was scabbed a dark red, almost purplish sort of colour where he'd been chewing on it. He looked _young_. Young and unformed and uncertain, and _still_ Kaoru might have said something, but Toshiya's eyes were suspiciously large and liquid-looking, and if there was one thing Kaoru was sure of, it was that he didn't think Toshiya would ever forgive him if he witnessed him crying.   
So: 'Okay,' he said quietly, 'Okay, of course. Sure.'   
And he quietly retreated into the bathroom, locking the door behind him with a soft clicking noise. He reached over and turned on the shower, but then forgot about it for a moment and allowed himself a small spell of gazing in the mirror, looking at his pale face and red-rimmed eyes. He looked like shit.  
Sighing, Kaoru rubbed his cool hands over his hot face. There was a headache starting just behind his eyes, a bad one, sending little needling pains right down into his ears and jaw; he wished he'd had the foresight to take his tablets in here with him. At least the bathroom was small and calm and neat and bare; at least it was dim and quiet and close. He turned the light off so that the only illumination was what crept in under the door; it was restful, that almost-black, that over-saturated grey. He felt his corners fading into it, tiredness washing him out, and it was soothing. He undressed in the dark, lost his body in the shadows, stood under the spray and washed in a sort of trance, soaping himself up and almost falling asleep on his feet. At some point during his shower the light under the door had gone out, but that was all right; he was used to the dark by then. He cranked off the water, towelled himself dry, brushed his teeth and combed through his hair with his fingers; when he finally went back into the bedroom he was careful to be extra quiet, but he needn't have bothered. Toshiya's jagged outline was gone from the window, and by the moonlight pouring in from outside Kaoru could quite clearly make out his shape in one of the beds, but...  
But Kaoru could just tell, somehow, that he wasn't asleep. That he would not be asleep for some time, no matter how exhausted he had looked. It was the splintery feeling in the air, the weird warmth and heaviness and humidity in the room that had nothing to do with the steam from Kaoru's shower, the broken, shuddering sort of rhythm of Toshiya's breathing—  
_He's crying.  
He doesn't want me to know, but he is, he's crying._  
So Kaoru stayed quiet as he dressed himself and slid into bed, flinching when the springs creaked because even though he knew Toshiya was awake, a complete dead silence seemed like the kindest, gentlest thing that Kaoru could offer him. Dignity, or at least the illusion of dignity. Letting Toshiya believe that _he_ believed.  
But then – 'Sleep well,' he mumbled stupidly, before he could stop himself.   
The torn feeling of the air between them made him think of that night all those years ago, Toshiya completely drenched from the rain and Kaoru fresh from the shower, just as he was now; the two of them spitting with rage and brawling like animals on Kaoru's apartment floor. Clawing, lunging, panting from exertion; the feeling of Toshiya's teeth sinking into his hand and the puffy ring of teeth marks that had marked it in the days afterwards; the bruises on Toshiya's neck and how guilty he'd felt.   
And yet the wounds had healed over. The bruises had faded and gradually disappeared; the bite had scabbed over and grown new skin, hadn't even scarred. It had seemed so impossible, at the time, that something that huge could be somehow patched up; smoothed over. That they'd managed, after all that, to forgive each other.  
The thought was somehow comforting. The fight they'd had stayed with him, flickering into life over and over behind his eyelids; it played out like a movie, first in his mind and then, seamlessly, in his dreams. He was too tired to even consider that the curtains were wide open and that his eye mask was still tucked away in his overnight case. Quickly, like waves wiping out a footprint on a sandy beach, Toshiya's shallow breaths lulled him into a deep sleep.

  
  



	10. Chapter 10

It felt like Kaoru had only just closed his eyes, but suddenly the hotel room was full of greyish light and the sound of shuffling, of something scuffling around. Rat noises. He rubbed his eyes. They felt dry and sore and painful.  
'Hello?' he said groggily. The noises stopped. There was a pause.   
'Kaoru. You're awake.'   
'Toshiya,' Kaoru said by way of response; he wasn't really capable of much more. He fumbled around on his bedside table for his glasses and pushed them onto his face; watched the blurry, wavy lines of the world turn solid and straight.   
Toshiya was standing at his bedside, fully dressed. He was all straight lines, too; hair drawn in damp lines over his shoulders and his body very rigid, his mouth an unsmiling line. His voice had been expressionless and pragmatic, as though he were documenting this event for future study.  
'Time is it?' Kaoru asked, just barely coherent, dragging himself into a sitting position.   
'Five. Nearly.'   
Kaoru groaned aloud before he could help himself, scrubbing at his face harshly to try and chase the tired numbness away. 'The hell are you doing up?' he asked, a brusque irritability in his voice that he didn't really feel. Toshiya just shrugged.  
'You're gonna be ex—' he broke himself off with a wide yawn, 'exhausted for the show.'   
'Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. I need the keys to the minivan.'   
Kaoru suddenly felt much more awake.   
'You what?'  
'The keys to the minivan,' Toshiya enunciated clearly, his hands fidgeting restlessly by his sides, 'I need them. Can I have them, please?'   
'Toshiya,' Kaoru said disbelievingly.  
'What?'  
'Absolutely, one hundred percent, no fucking way. Of _course_ not. Where do you even want to _go_?'  
'Mind your own business,' Toshiya said steadily.  
'Can you even _drive_?'  
'Of course I can fucking drive!'  
Kaoru exhaled loudly through his nose. '_Legally_?' he added pointedly, and Toshiya hesitated. He hadn't taken the test to earn his license yet; there hadn't really felt like any point. Back when he was living in Nagano he'd started taking lessons, but then by the time he was nineteen he was living in Osaka, and there didn't really seem like much point in keeping them up in the city. Besides, he couldn't fully comprehend the idea of driving in Osaka, with those roads that ran five lanes wide and the thousands of other cars around and all the roads going to places he didn't know.  
And Kaoru knew this full well, which was probably why he was starting to get that smug look on his face. Toshiya's jaw set.  
'All right,' he said as calmly as he could, 'You come. You have your license.'   
'You want me to get out of bed at five in the morning, and drive you to – _where_, exactly?'  
'Home,' Toshiya said shortly, starting to gnaw on his thumbnail, 'My hometown. It's about forty kilometres away; maybe not even that. And I don't need you to drive, I just need you to be in the car with me so that _I _can drive. So?'  
'So what?'  
'So, let's _go_,' Toshiya said, like he was talking to an idiot.  
Kaoru felt a headache starting.   
'We have a _show_ tonight.'   
'Okay,' Toshiya said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, 'If we're not back in fourteen hours' time then I'll take full responsibility; how's that?'   
'We'd need to be back by at least two,' Kaoru corrected him automatically, 'For soundcheck and everything.'  
Toshiya closed his eyes for a moment. 'Okay. That's still a good nine hours away, Kaoru, so I _think_ we'll make it.'   
Steadily, the two of them stared at each other, but Kaoru blinked first. He dragged a hand through his already sleep-wild hair, and sighed heavily. He felt as though he could have slept for about a thousand more years, except he knew he couldn't. Even if Toshiya somehow agreed to piss off and leave him alone to rest, he knew that his mind was too awake now; it was buzzing, buzzing, buzzing with the bassist and his stupid plans.   
Truthfully, he knew that he'd worry about him if he let him go alone. There was a strange look to Toshiya's face and a tone to his voice that Kaoru had never heard before, didn't really understand, and it concerned him; made him feel somehow unsettled, as though he'd lost something or forgotten something but couldn't quite say what.   
'Fine,' Kaoru said at last, sullenly. 'But I'm driving. You can direct me.'   
'Okay,' Toshiya agreed placidly.  
'And you owe me,' Kaoru added, kicking the covers off himself as he went to brush his teeth.  
'Okay,' Toshiya repeated, just slightly quieter.

  
  


They each would have been surprised – and a little irritated – to know how young they looked, leaving the hotel and crossing the car park to where the minivan was parked; the sun was only just crawling up over the mountains and it lit their pale faces up with an optimistic golden colour, blurred the worried lines on their foreheads and washed out the dark shadows under their eyes. It was not late enough to be warm, yet, and a low, chilly mist still hung in thin drifts across the tarmac.   
'Listen,' Toshiya said softly. 'I haven't heard this in ages.'  
'What?' Kaoru asked, and Toshiya looked at him as though he was a lunatic.   
'The _birds_,' he said emphatically.  
And Kaoru instantly felt like a moron, because as soon as Toshiya mentioned it the sound of them was everywhere: a hundred thousand tiny birds, what sounded like, singing and chirping and talking to each other in the trees, on the power lines, beneath the eaves of buildings, and even inside the minivan with the door shut he could still hear it, shrill and light, like trickling water.   
'The dawn chorus,' Toshiya explained, settling in behind the driver's seat – how had _that_ happened? – 'I used to hear it all the time. I don't hear it in the city.'  
He took the keys neatly from Kaoru's loosely curled fist and twisted them in the ignition. The engine came to life with a smell that was dirty but friendly. His hands were white-knuckled on the wheel, and his jaw looked tense as he steered the two of them out of the car park and, a little unsteadily, onto the road. There was almost no other traffic around at this hour.   
They drove mostly in silence. Kaoru turned on the radio but once they were outside of the city the reception turned to static and he shut it off; he felt he needed all of his concentration, anyway. Toshiya lurched around corners and braked too abruptly, changed gears too sharply; he was taking them up skinny, winding mountain roads that showed, on Kaoru's side, about two feet of guard rail and then about a hundred feet of sheer drop, and he was starting to feel a little sick.   
'Must have been trippy learning to drive around here,' he commented nervously, and Toshiya's mouth twitched into something like a smile.   
'You scared?'  
'No,' Kaoru said quickly. Toshiya's smile widened, and he glanced across at him.  
'Thanks for coming with me,' he said, his face sweet and young and remarkably free from complication. 'It's kind of you.'  
Somehow, that seemed to make Kaoru even more uncomfortable than the prospect of a painful, fiery death in a ravine; he went red, and suddenly became very interested in making sure that his seatbelt was lying flat and neat across his chest.   
  
It was a relief when, after crossing over a river and steering straight through several tiny towns, Toshiya at last seemed to be slowing down. They'd entered into a little collection of houses – it would have been generous to call it a village – cut into a very sheer mountainside, quite high-up feeling; Kaoru's ears had popped on the way and so had Toshiya's, if the way he kept rubbing at them was anything to go by. Toshiya pulled over apparently at random and got out of the van, so Kaoru followed suit; he found the bassist's silence unnerving, though he supposed he could have just been tired. He didn't look as though he'd slept at all.   
With a terse sort of movement, Toshiya nodded towards a small dirt track, winding up in between dense trees.   
'It's just up there,' he muttered. 'Just a short way.'  
'Is it safe for us to leave the van here?' Kaoru asked anxiously, and Toshiya snorted.   
'Oh, definitely not. Vicious gangs of car-jacking thugs are hiding everywhere, but we'll just have to take our chances.'   
Which might have been a fair reaction, actually, Kaoru thought: there was a weird feeling here, like nobody might be awake or even alive for miles around. They could probably leave the van here for a decade and come back to nothing more than a parking ticket.   
Toshiya had already veered off the street and was now making his way up the track through the trees, hugging his own body tight for warmth. It wasn't far: they'd been climbing for only a minute or so before he took a sudden and almost hidden left fork and came up against a rusted-looking gate set into a high stone wall. It had clearly been painted green at one point, but now the paint was hanging off it in ribbons; it crumbled away under even Toshiya's gentle touch. Through it Kaoru could see a house: a little, squat-looking place of whitewashed wood, with a closed-off look about it. All the windows were dark. Toshiya pushed at the gate carefully, and frowned.  
'It's locked,' he said in an odd tone of voice.  
Kaoru shrugged, feeling a little more alive for the climb. 'Can you call them?'  
'I did. I mean, I left a message last night, saying I'd...' he trailed off. 'Hang on.'   
With a quick, surreptitious glance over his shoulder at Kaoru, Toshiya hooked his foot into the crossbar of the gate and pulled himself gracefully upward. Curls and flecks of paint and rust drifted down to the dirt as he hooked a leg over the top and – after just a split-second of looking uncertain – dropped lithely down the other side.  
'It needs a key,' he explained, 'Climb over.'   
'Excuse me?' Kaoru said pointedly, and Toshiya shrugged.   
'Come on. It's not difficult.'   
'Toshiya,' Kaoru hissed, 'I haven't even met your family. I don't think I'm exactly on trespassing terms.'   
Toshiya rolled his eyes. Up close, Kaoru thought, he looked exhausted. Viewed through the bars of the gate he was realer than real, sort of hyper-realistic, like virtual reality. His eyes reflected the sky and the trees.   
'Fine,' he said shortly, 'I'll just go and knock.' He hesitated. 'I didn't bring a door key with me, or anything. I didn't think I'd be coming here.'   
'I'll wait,' Kaoru said – rather pointlessly, since he was clearly stuck on one side of the fence, and Toshiya was already making his way up the path that ran down the centre of the rather shabby, quite overgrown garden. Stinging nettles were crowding in from the edges, and ivy had taken hold of the side of the house. The windows of the house looked like blank eyes.   
And without warning, Kaoru's stomach dropped. He became very calmly, very sensibly aware that something about this was wrong, and he wanted to shout out a warning; to do something, _anything_, to get Toshiya to turn back without knocking on that buckling wooden door, but he couldn't. There was no time, or time seemed to be slowing down, or he couldn't get his voice to work, or _something_: all he could do was watch, helpless as some aquarium creature in a tank, as Toshiya's thin, pale hand rose in the morning light and rapped lightly on the door.   
There was a long silence. Toshiya knocked again.  
From the back, his posture looked stiff. He knocked a third time. A light breeze caught his hair and started to play with it, and Toshiya's hand made a fist and instead of knocking he hammered on the door, the sound huge in the early morning quiet.   
No answer. In the trees the birds chattered on, shrilly. An aeroplane droned overhead, so far up it was little more than a speck, a mote of dust. Kaoru watched as Toshiya picked his awkward way through the straggly garden and, cupping his hands around his eyes, peered through one of the dark windows.   
'It's empty,' he said. He sounded surprised, and it was that more than anything that made Kaoru want to cover his ears.   
But: 'Maybe they've gone on holiday,' he suggested stupidly from behind the fence. Toshiya's body from the back seemed very tall and straight, like a line drawn with a ruler, and his shoulders seemed to be drawn up unnaturally high, his arms clamped around his body again, like he was cold.   
'No,' Toshiya said in a peculiar voice, 'I mean there's no furniture or anything. There's nothing.'  
'Toshiya—'  
'Nobody lives here.'   
'Are you sure it's the right house?' Kaoru asked, bracing himself for a vitriolic response, but Toshiya didn't even turn around.  
'Yeah,' he said softly. 'That—' he raised one skinny arm, pointing up at a dormer window that stuck out of the side of the house like a tumour, 'That used to be my bedroom. There—' he shook his head limply, his long hair falling over his shoulder blades, 'there aren't any other houses up this way.'   
He was quiet for a long moment.   
For some reason it was hard to look at him; Kaoru lowered his eyes, looking down at the dirt and the gate and his own feet. He wrapped a hand around a bar of the gate, felt the crunch of the flaking paint beneath his palm. He didn't have the faintest idea what he could say; didn't know what Toshiya would even want to hear. His own silence seemed enormous, the way explosions are big; he was aware of the two of them standing very separate, segregated by this gate that, just like the rest of the house, showed signs of not having been used in some time: just like the gate was peeling, rusting, the whitewash on the house was looking worn and the windows were dirty and there were a few shingles missing from the roof and the ivy had crept all over, almost impressively invasive, its tendrils forcing new holes in the wood and snaking through the places where the window frames had warped.   
There was a loud clatter, a splintering sound, and a small spray of shattered glass rained heavily amongst the tangled weeds in the garden. Kaoru looked up to find Toshiya bent, searching the ground for rocks; when he found them he sent them sailing up against the side of the house. He caught another window, which shattered; the edge of the roof, which dislodged a couple more tiles and sent them sailing down to crack against the garden path, narrowly missing Toshiya's body; he aimed a few against the front door, splintering the wood, and Kaoru felt his own hands tightening around the bars of the gate and his own foot rising up and then the yank of his muscles, dragging his weight up far less elegantly than Toshiya had done, and then the sudden, nauseous height and the uncomfortable press of the narrow gate against his groin, and then he was dropping, stumbling, almost falling up the garden path and wrapping his arms around Toshiya from the back, pinning his limbs against his sides before he could throw anything more and feeling the thudding of his heartbeat, the unevenness of his breaths and the way they caught in his throat.  
'That's enough,' Kaoru said firmly, speaking into the back of Toshiya's neck.  
'_Let me go—_'  
'That's _enough_, I said,' Kaoru repeated, louder, fighting to keep Toshiya's arms down by his sides. 'So they've left,' he said, speaking very quickly into Toshiya's ear because he was aware that he couldn't very well restrain him for long, 'So they've moved away and didn't tell you, that – it sucks, it _sucks_, but what are you going to do? Tear down their house?'  
'It's not their house any more,' Toshiya said in a strangled voice, and Kaoru tightened his grip desperately.   
'Are you going to tear down the house,' he amended, his voice low and quick and calm, 'Or are you going to come with me, and let me drive you back to the city, where you're gonna put on a sold out show with your friends tonight?'   
'You're not my friends,' Toshiya argued, his voice ragged, 'You're my co-workers, and you're only _that_ because you forced the others to take me.'   
'That's bullshit,' Kaoru said smoothly, his arms tightening around Toshiya's waist, 'Maybe it started out that way, but you know they like you, they _love_ you now, and like it or not, we are your friends. Even – even me. Even though you're an absolute fucking nightmare most of the time, I'm still – we're still—' he broke off a little lamely. 'I'd still do anything for you,' he added in uncomfortably.   
Quiet. Toshiya didn't seem to know what to say to that; neither of them did. The birds cried on and the two of them stayed where they were, Kaoru holding Toshiya tightly, his breath warm on the back of the other man's neck, and finally Toshiya nodded. The tension went out of his body, and he breathed out slowly. Still they stood there, and in an awkward manoeuvre, Toshiya bent his arms clumsily up at the elbow and patted Kaoru's hands where they were locked around him.   
Very carefully, their fingers linked together. If they'd been questioned, neither one of them would have been able to say who had done it.   
'We should get back,' Kaoru said quietly.  
'Yeah, we should.' Toshiya swallowed, paused. Kaoru's body was warm, pressed against his back; it made him want to lean into him. He forced himself to stand straighter. Their hands unlinked and they stepped apart. 'Do you want to drive?' Toshiya asked.  
'Try and stop me,' Kaoru said in a strained voice, and then they were laughing a little awkwardly, and Toshiya made to tug his T-shirt back into place but found that Kaoru's hands were already there, smoothing it around his waist.  
Toshiya smiled at him; an unfamiliar smile, shy, but warm. Without thinking about it too much, Kaoru smiled back, and then one by one they climbed back over the fence, and made their way back down the path without speaking.   
  
It was past eight by the time they arrived back at the hotel, and the chilly, dewy remains of the night had been overcome by a sudden rich, buttery-yellow sunshine that made them both blink and squint their eyes. It shone behind Kaoru and blanked out his face, which Toshiya decided was for the best: looking at him, his heart felt as though it was pounding unusually hard; not _fast_, just – _heavy_. Each beat struck something inside him that made him resonate, trembling to his edges, like a gong.  
'Will they be awake?' Toshiya asked, and Kaoru shrugged.   
'Maybe. Doubt they'll be up if they are,' he responded smoothly. 'You should eat some breakfast.'  
'I'm not really hungry.'   
'Yeah, but you won't be hungry later, either, and by the time it's too late you'll be starving. Eat.' Kaoru paused. 'You look thin.'   
'I'm supposed to look thin,' Toshiya retorted a little sulkily, but his heart wasn't in it. Kaoru held the door open for him and the two of them entered the lobby, still empty at this time of day, a tiny room that was almost completely overtaken by a large potted plant. His throat felt suddenly very dry, and he licked his lips anxiously. 'Look, Kaoru—'  
He paused, unsure of what to say. He had been half-expecting Kaoru to cut him off, but the older man was watching him patiently.   
'About Yoshiki,' Toshiya said at last, painfully, and watched the brief expression of – what was it, that flickered over Kaoru's face? Anger? Not exactly. Discomfort? Definitely that, but something else, as well; an expression that Toshiya didn't recognise. He couldn't in all his life recall somebody looking at him in that way, but when he blinked, Kaoru looked normal again.   
'What,' he said in a clipped sort of voice, shoving his hands in his pockets in a sort of pantomime of lightness and ease.   
'I just – I wanted to say that I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done...I just shouldn't have. I'm sorry.'   
It was weird: the words had been difficult to get out, sticking in his throat like a pill that was too big, and his cheeks felt hot and the back of his neck was warm and his fingers were shaking, but still, he felt – _better_. Lighter, even though his hands and face were starting to feel sort of numb and Kaoru still wasn't saying anything or even looking at him, and Toshiya didn't really know where to put his eyes so he stared at the patterns in the carpet until they started to distort.  
There was a long silence, and then finally Kaoru just shook his head.   
'I don't want to talk about that,' he said in a stiff, quiet voice. 'Whatever happened, I'm supposed to be the leader of this band. I'm supposed to take charge. I shouldn't ever have let things get to that state – I shouldn't have let you get to the point where you felt you had to do that.'  
'But I _didn't_,' Toshiya said emphatically, 'That's what I'm trying to say; it wasn't anything to do with how you are as leader, I promise. You're actually—' he broke off, strangely breathless, 'You're actually really good, Kaoru, you're—'  
'I really don't want to talk about it,' Kaoru repeated, his voice still stiff and sterner now, harder. 'Any of it.'   
'But I—'  
'Stop it,' Kaoru said harshly, and then swallowed. '_Please_,' he added.   
Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Toshiya's cheeks were still red, tight and hot feeling, and he leant slightly forward so that his hair fell over his face and shielded him from view.  
'Okay,' he said.  
Another silence.  
'Thank you,' Kaoru said finally.   
Toshiya became acutely aware of how much he wanted a cigarette, and fished around in his pocket for the pack he carried with him; it was pretty crushed, but the contents had held up all right.   
'I'm going to...' he held the pack in the air.  
'Right,' Kaoru said, determinedly not meeting his eye. 'I'm going to head upstairs. Try and get a bit more sleep. You should...think about doing the same, once you're done. You look like shit.'   
Those last words came out rather more bluntly than he'd intended. It took all of his effort to not glance over at Toshiya, but he managed. Without looking back once, he nodded a goodbye and started up the stairs, his body so tired that his head felt as though it was floating and his limbs were made of stone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so sorry for the late update, but: I saw Dir en grey on Wednesday and they were _so fucking good_. Like, I gave myself a set of pulled muscles headbanging (this is not dignified. I'm in my 20s and no longer dress like a sad witch).


	11. Chapter 11

Toshiya didn't go back to his room. He had no interest in catching up on lost sleep.  
He felt giddy, awake, alone, jittery, manic. He felt crazy with exhaustion and itchy all over with the feeling of being a hick, being a rube, being pedestrian, a fag, a phony.  
The day had turned out overcast but very, very warm, with a dark bank of cloud hovering low around the mountains and keeping the heat in so that the air felt pressing and stuffy. It was humid and the bright freshness of the early morning, with just him and Kaoru standing clasped together in the quiet, felt like a dream. His memory of it was behaving like a dream, too, slipping further away the more he tried to cling onto it: all he could see in his mind's eye was the house, the shingles cracking and falling from its roof, and a vague sense of Kaoru hovering behind him. The incongruousness of Kaoru in that environment: that was like a dream, too. Holding onto him so tightly.  
He'd started walking almost without thinking about it; out of the hotel parking lot and onto the street, which was still quiet at this hour on a Sunday morning and gave off the smells of soot and rain and trapped heat.   
It crossed his mind that he need not go back to the hotel, not if he didn't want to. The only important thing he'd left there was the key to his apartment, and thinking about it, there was no reason why he ever had to go back _there_, either. Say he just vanished: what was the worst that could happen? The band would assume he was dead and forget about him, or they'd understand he'd simply walked out and be furious with him, and their little label would sue him for breach of contract, and Yoshiki would maybe send a lawyer after him and the weird crossover their lives had taken would become a tragedy in three acts: one, Toshiya having Yoshiki's poster on his wall; two, Toshiya on his knees in front of him in an entirely white bedroom; three, Toshiya in a courtroom, getting fucked in an entirely different way.   
Well, let them sue him. It wasn't as though he had any money. He already had little debts, and they would give him big debts, and then he would declare himself bankrupt and insolvent and the whole world would finally, _finally_ fuck off.  
He stopped walking so suddenly that the momentum nearly tripped him: he had been almost running. There was a woman on the pavement ahead of him, walking towards him: a nice looking young woman in a shin-length floral skirt and a sleeveless pastel blouse and bare legs and flat shoes, and she was very determinedly avoiding eye contact with him, like she was expecting him to go crazy at any moment. Toshiya blinked the sweat out of his eyes. He looked pale and wild from lack of sleep, his hair was long and straggly, his nails were painted; without entirely meaning to he yelled '_fuck_!' and kicked out at the wall of the nearest building.   
The young woman gave him a wide-eyed look and hastily crossed the street. Right there on the pavement, Toshiya squatted down and put his head in his hands and tried to force himself to breathe deeply. It was boiling hot but he was shivering; what was that about? He felt like he'd run a hundred miles. He felt like he was going to throw up. He felt like having sex with somebody. He wanted to be fifteen again and lying on the bed in his attic bedroom and listening to Black Sabbath. He wanted to jerk off. He wanted to be held. He wanted to shout until his throat was hoarse and tell the whole band they could go fuck themselves and drink himself into a stupor.   
Toshiya felt weirdly ill and depleted, his body buzzing with an energy that felt dirty and unwholesome, like an engine burning up some filthy, toxic fuel. Still, he made himself stand up and carry on walking. The air was horribly thick. He walked into the first bar he came across and had to almost physically drag himself up onto one of the high stools at the counter, feeling weak and shivery and almost feverish; his whole body was trembling and he bit at his nails. When was the last time he'd eaten? He couldn't remember. He hadn't slept in thirty-one hours. The sound system in the bar was playing _Islands in the Stream_, a song he truly despised.  
'Whisky,' he said edgily to the bartender.   
'What whisky would you like?'  
'Your cheapest,' Toshiya said edgily, and watched as his drink was poured in front of him. It was the orange colour of light pollution and the surface was covered in an oily slick. He drank it even though the urge to throw up was stronger than ever.   
  
By the time anybody realised he was missing, Toshiya was five drinks deep into his impromptu bender and a dirty rain had started to sift down, soaking the streets a darker grey and releasing their pent-up smell of car exhaust and rubber tyres. The discovery of his absence was a slow one and came out of the frustrating process of people each in turn assuming he was in the shower, getting changed, having a nap, having a cigarette, taking a piss, eating lunch. And then when they had realised that he'd vanished, when it had become too obvious to ignore, nobody had wanted to be the one to say it, and so it had fallen to Kaoru to light what felt like his billionth cigarette of the day and say, quite harshly, 'He's gone.'   
In response, all three of his bandmates' heads had swivelled towards him hopefully, like balloons drifting on an air current. Kaoru inhaled a hard lungful of smoke and then exhaled through his nose. With his sharp-planed face and eyes narrowed in thought and the smoke billowing out around him, he looked uncannily like a dragon.  
'We have to look for him. He can't have gone far.'  
'He might have done,' Kyo said flatly.   
'He doesn't have a car.'   
'Cabs. Buses. We need to soundcheck.'   
'Yeah. Yes. Okay.' Kaoru knuckled his own forehead roughly, trying to force his mind to stop its frenzied turning and to focus: 'All right. Kyo and I will go to the venue and soundcheck; Die and Shinya, you need to go out and look for him. Head towards the centre and look in bars and pubs.'   
'He might be in a whole different city by now,' Kyo said loftily, and Kaoru wondered briefly if he might actually be enjoying this. Or not _enjoying_ it, but – the vocalist was watching him in a way that seemed pleasantly interested, as though Kaoru was a very fascinating programme he had come across on TV.  
'He won't be,' he said with a firmness he didn't feel. 'Just trust me.'   
'Kao,' Die said anxiously, 'We should swap; you need to go out and look for him. You'll be able to find him faster than any of us.'   
'We can't. I need to make sure everything's set up properly, and you don't know how to check the drums or bass.'  
'But—'  
'Keep calling him,' Kaoru interrupted, fixing his eyes on Die's very firmly in order to make him shut up and listen, 'And leave messages; even if he doesn't answer he might listen to them. Take the van, and – even if he doesn't want to come, make him.' He flicked his eyes over to glance at Shinya too, who was gazing back at him steadily. 'Pick him up; _drag_ him if you have to. And call me as soon as you find him.'   
  
Those were, Kaoru was able to acknowledge later, some of the worst few hours of his life. He and Kyo had gone to the venue in a tense silence, taking a cab because their only means of transport was now being piloted around the streets by a very intense-looking Die whilst Shinya, who hated speaking on the phone at the best of times, made call after call and left message after uncomfortable message on Toshiya's mobile phone. He'd done the best job he could with all three guitars – both electrics and Die's acoustic, which seemed to warp completely out of tune overnight – whilst working as quickly as possible, and he'd run through Shinya's drums next because somehow touching Toshiya's bass felt like a karmic act, a weird taboo. To a backdrop of Kyo doing practice screams and grunts and gurgles into a microphone, he eventually reached the point where he couldn't put it off any longer: he picked up Toshiya's red and white bass and adjusted its strap over his body, trying to compensate for the fact that Toshiya was taller and broader in the shoulders than he was. The strap was his favourite, leather that had gone soft through repeat use: it smelled good, like something more than leather, and with his fingers on the strings and halfway through picking out a slightly halting rendition of the bassline to _Raison D'__ê__tre_, Kaoru realised why.  
_It's him. It smells like him. _  
For a moment he paused, lowering his head towards his shoulder so that he could breathe it in more fully. His soap, and his skin, and his cigarette smoke. Of course, Toshiya had worn this strap against his bare neck a thousand times or more when they'd been practising, but it felt like an omen. Like a _good_ omen; like there was a part of him still present.   
Still, it was two hours before Die called to say that they'd found him. His voice on the phone was stilted and uncomfortable, not very Die-like at all, and when the two of them finally pushed him through the side door of their venue Kaoru understood why: the bassist stood swaying, his face the colour of milk, and he was leaning so heavily on Die that the guitarist was tottering slightly.   
'What the fuck,' Kaoru said harshly. He'd been biting nervously at the insides of his cheeks, he realised suddenly: he poked his tongue gently against the fissures he'd made. They were sweet with blood. 'He's – _wasted_.'   
'Yeah,' Die said uselessly, sort of piling Toshiya down onto the steps leading up to the stage, 'He, uh, puked out of the van window. Didn't get any inside, though.'   
'I hate it when people throw up,' Shinya said. Stepping daintily over Toshiya, he settled down gratefully behind his drum set and gave an experimental tap to his snare. He smiled. 'Oh, that sounds quite good. Thanks, Kaoru.'   
'What the fuck are we going to do?' Kyo asked icily.   
Once again, all three of their heads turned towards Kaoru. Like he had all the answers. Like they actually trusted him, as their leader, to get them out of this mess.   
Kaoru firmed his mouth. 'Leave it to me,' he said.  
  
It was their tough luck that the venue in Nagano was a relatively small, cramped live house: not the kind of place to be equipped with a big backstage area, huge dressing rooms, or a shower.   
Still. Kaoru could improvise.  
Moving him was the biggest problem. Toshiya wasn't heavy, but he was tall and unwieldy and when he swayed he sent the both of them off-balance: in the end Kaoru found himself acting as a sort of crutch, with Toshiya draped all over his shoulders. His body felt thin and shivery and greasy with sweat. The bathroom backstage was a small one – unisex, tiled, three beige cubicles and three porcelain sinks – and in the dim, echoey room Kaoru availed himself of the facilities by shoving Toshiya's head into one of the sinks and turning the cold tap on full blast.  
The bassist gasped, struggled. His wet hands slipped on the side of the sink and he fell to the floor, dripping and shivering but staring up at Kaoru a bit more lucidly, which was a euphemistic way of saying that he looked like a wet and violently pissed-off cat.   
'Wh-what the _f-f-fuck_,' he said, his words juddering out of control from either the cold or the shock. With sloppy movements he managed to drag himself into a half-sitting position against the wall, his head lolling against the sink, and Kaoru squatted down in front of him.   
'Toshiya,' he said, trying to speak as calmly and neutrally as possible, 'Listen to me. It's four o'clock. We're going onstage in three hours.' He paused, giving that time to sink in. 'This is what's going to happen,' he said after a moment, 'You're going to eat something, and then I'll help you sort out your face and hair. You're gonna put on your stage clothes, and you're going to go on, and you're going to stay by the back of the stage, on my side, and I'm going to keep an eye on you.'   
'Kaoru,' Toshiya said, his voice wavering pathetically, and Kaoru closed his eyes briefly.   
'I'll keep an eye on you,' he repeated, but gentler. 'I won't let anything go wrong.'  
'You don't – you don't even know—'  
'No,' Kaoru said warily, 'I don't.'  
'You don't _know_,' Toshiya repeated emphatically, gripping the sink again and trying to use it to pull himself upright; he failed, his head knocking against the tiled wall with a sound that made Kaoru wince, though he appeared not to feel it. 'I don't – I don't know what to do.'  
'Just do what I said,' Kaoru suggested, and Toshiya closed his eyes.  
'Kaoru,' he slurred, 'I don't – I don't have anyone.'   
'That's not true,' Kaoru said quietly.   
'I'm so _fucking_ alone!'   
His drunken shout echoed around the bathroom, and he slumped. He was breathing very shallowly, and he smelled fiercely alcoholic. He didn't move at all apart from the occasional swallow, his skinny throat rippling. For a long moment they were both very still, Kaoru staring at Toshiya and Toshiya staring at the floor.  
Finally, without saying anything, Toshiya stuck out his hand and allowed Kaoru to pull him to his feet.   
  
The miracle was that, in the end, they actually managed to pull it off. Kaoru sat Toshiya down in their tiny dressing room and teased his hair out; he held his lolling head by the chin and painted his face with stage makeup. He fed him an apple, and then a cereal bar, and pushed him to keep sipping at water, and Shinya made him a coffee and Die gave him a diet coke. Onstage he was able to stand at least, and miraculously able to play; Kaoru supposed that by now the notes must be ingrained into his muscle memory, for he hardly missed a beat. He kept to the back, to the shadows; in a brief pause between songs he darted offstage and threw up an apple, a cereal bar, water, coffee and a diet coke. But he was okay; it was okay, in the end. They made it through. They played a one-song encore and piled into the minivan without lingering outside the stage door, without signing autographs, Toshiya propped shoulder-to-shoulder between Kaoru and Die so his state wouldn't be too obvious, and back at the hotel he at least seemed capable of turning on the shower himself and brushing his own teeth, so Kaoru left him to it.   
He sat down on the edge of his bed and waited, feeling as though he'd aged by about a decade. Now that the anxious adrenaline had worn off, he had a headache. The inside of his mouth felt tender and almost irresistibly sore; the urge to keep biting was enormous.  
Toshiya came silently out of the bathroom, and Kaoru went silently in. He showered, letting stage makeup and hairspray go streaming down the drain, dressed himself in pyjama pants and a loose T-shirt, towelled his hair dry. He brushed his teeth and spat out minty foam that was tinged just vaguely pink with blood.   
When he came out Toshiya was sitting on the floor, sloppily dressed in loose boxers and an inside-out X Japan T-shirt, his towel a sodden lump next to him and his wet hair trailing over his face and shoulders and chest. Black and blue, like a bruise. Kaoru picked up his towel and placed it neatly back on the towel rail in the bathroom. Tentatively, as though Toshiya might bite, he reached inside that tangled screen of hair and found Toshiya's jaw; used it to angle his face up so that they were eye to eye.   
'You know what I have to say,' Kaoru said at last, quietly. 'This is the only intervention you get. If you pull this shit again, cheat our audience like that again, you're out. I mean that. Do you understand?'  
Toshiya's jawbone felt very light and delicate against his hand, so well-made, like something turned on a lathe. His skin post-shower was soft-feeling, flushed with the heat of the water; he smelled of soap, of toothpaste, of his own skin and still, underneath, just vaguely alcoholic, the way that a sweater worn around a bonfire will smell of autumn for weeks afterwards.  
Very slightly, meeting Kaoru's gaze, Toshiya nodded. He closed his eyes and lowered his head, nestling his face more securely into the cup of Kaoru's palm. He seemed comfortable, which left Kaoru feeling a little uncertain of what to do. A little awkwardly, he crouched down in front of him. At least that way he was holding his arm out at a less uncomfortable angle.   
'My head hurts,' Toshiya said indistinctly.  
'Yeah. It'll do that.'   
The two of them were quiet for a few moments. Toshiya was breathing very shallowly, Kaoru noticed, his chest rising and falling quickly and the sound of it soft, kittenish.  
'You wore the tartan pants tonight.'  
'Yeah.'  
'I like those on you,' Toshiya said a little drunkenly, and Kaoru bit back a smile.   
'Thanks.'   
There was a short pause.   
'I almost left,' Toshiya said. He opened his eyes and clumsily scraped the hair from in front of his face. His gaze, locked on Kaoru's face, was tired but very clear. 'I wanted to leave.'   
Kaoru was quiet. Slowly he became aware that his thumb was moving, stroking up the line of Toshiya's jawbone carefully. He had such delicate lips, so pouty: a girl's lips. They were darker red in places where he'd bitten them.  
'Don't leave,' Kaoru said at last, softly.   
Toshiya's skin was _so_ soft. And his hair was so – _pretty_, fanning out around him like that, and his hands looked so elegant with the nails painted dark, and the smudged remains of black makeup around his eyes somehow broke up the more masculine shapes to his face, made him look – _somehow_—  
'You look like a girl,' Kaoru said. He felt it against his palm as Toshiya sort of laughed through his nose, turned his smile into Kaoru's palm.  
'I'm supposed to, aren't I?'  
'Don't leave,' Kaoru repeated. 'Don't go. Please.'   
Toshiya's eyes seemed to be boring into his.  
'But you hate me,' he said flatly.  
'I don't _hate_ you.'   
'You hate what I did.'   
Woodenly, Kaoru stroked his hair. 'It's behind us,' he lied. 'It doesn't matter.'   
'It _matters_, Kaoru.'  
'Not right now—'  
'Why can't you just _forgive_ me?' Toshiya interrupted him, his voice not slurred exactly but loose, the words taking on their own shapes.   
'Toshiya—'  
'No, I – _seriously_. I've never met anyone so fucking – emotionally – _tight_.'   
'“Tight”?' Kaoru repeated politely.  
'I'm really, _really_ sorry. Is that what you want?'  
'I'm not emotionally tight. I don't even know what that means.'   
'You make everything,' Toshiya said dangerously, 'So difficult.'  
'_I_ make everything difficult?'  
'Yeah, you do!'  
'Well, I'm not the one threatening to run away every minute. _I'm_ not the one showing up blind drunk to the first actual, proper tour we've ever done; you do know that you could have ruined _everything_, don't you?'   
'So let me go,' Toshiya said from between gritted teeth. 'I'm obviously not right for this, so let me leave.'   
'You don't have anywhere else to go,' Kaoru said harshly.   
His hand was still on Toshiya's face, he realised; he pulled it away. He knotted his hands tightly between his knees, squeezing them until the knuckles cracked. They were aching. His fingertips were criss-crossed with tiny cuts from running his fingers over the frets of his guitar; even after his shower, they smelled vaguely of cheap metal from the strings. Outside it was raining again, a misty sort of rain that seemed to breathe on the windows.   
At long last Kaoru offered a hand to Toshiya, and the bassist took it. Stiffly the two of them got to their feet, and Kaoru swallowed.   
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I shouldn't have said that.'  
Tiredly, Toshiya just shook his head.   
'Why can't you forgive me?' he repeated in a mumble, and Kaoru gave a jagged shrug.   
'I don't know,' he said honestly.   
After that there wasn't much more to say, and so the two of them went to bed.  
  
  



	12. Chapter 12

_Why can't you just forgive me?_  
The words seemed to echo around Kaoru's head, keeping him awake even though he was so bone-tired that his whole body felt heavy, leaden, as though all his flesh was being replaced by metal. His eyes were dry and sore and his fingers hurt and he was so exhausted that he kept shivering, but still he stayed curled up tightly on his side, his gaze steady and stubborn and fixed on Toshiya's sleeping form, just a few feet across the room.   
With his face resting, he looked even more like a girl than ever. His hair had dried and the blue streaks glinted lighter in the moonlight, and his face was nestled against his pillow in a way that made him look soft and defenceless. It was confusing, because looking at him, Kaoru didn't _want_ to be angry. It was just that there was so much that was tangled up between them, so many parts of their relationship that had become snared and knotted together.  
As if proving his point, Toshiya shifted in his sleep so that the covers slid down his chest: the X Japan logo on his T-shirt hit Kaoru like a punch in the gut and made him want to shake him.   
Everything they did now, every tiny measure of success they achieved, would lead back to this. They could play a sold out Budokan and the crowd could be screaming for them and they could have money and fame and total adoration and in Kaoru's mind, it would always come back to the same thing: a mental image of Toshiya on his knees, his fingers curling against Yoshiki's thighs. His lips bright red and stretched, his head bobbing up and down, his eyes dark and open and staring up—  
Kaoru felt a sort of twitch, and he stilled. His mouth went suddenly dry. Between his legs his cock was half-hard, brushing up a little insistently against the front of his pyjama pants.   
_What the hell?_  
He lay very, very still.  
The thing was, Toshiya had given them everything. And he had ruined everything. And Kaoru had no idea at all of how he was supposed to handle having both of those thoughts inside his head at the same time.   
And now there was something else, too. And now he was scared.  
  
The rest of the tour passed almost in a daze. Compared to the excited nervousness of their first few shows and the absolute debacle that Nagano had been (Kaoru had held vague hopes that their second show there might give them an opportunity to redeem themselves, but everybody had seemed oddly nervous and hadn't really played as well as they could. They all knew it, too: the atmosphere in the minivan on the way back to the hotel was distinctly embarrassed), the rest of the shows on the tour seemed almost completely featureless. There were small triumphs – Kaoru loved playing fanclub-only gigs, because it reminded him that they _actually had a fanclub_ – but they were sparse and thin, and overriding them completely was his constant feeling of unease. It wasn't just when he was around Toshiya, although it was at its worst then; it was when he was alone, too. It was as though his mind had worked itself into a rut – as though it had formed some neural channel that ran deeper than the others, a kind of basin where every thought that ran through his head eventually flowed to; no matter what he did, what he read or listened to or watched, no matter _how_ he tried to distract himself, his mind always ended up back there: the image of Toshiya on his knees, giving head to some nameless, faceless shadow.   
The Yoshiki part had somehow been excised. It still wasn't right but it felt cleaner that way; purer. Less guilty.   
Although he was aware that it still very much was something to feel guilty about. He felt watched, like he was under constant surveillance; he kept waiting for the truth of it to write itself over his face and for his bandmates to recoil in disgust. He almost _wished_ it was something he could get caught for. Wished it was something he could be punished for. Not just for thinking about it, but for the way it made him _feel_.   
He'd been terrified at first that it had been the fucked-up power dynamic that had been doing it for him, and had actually wondered if there might actually be something really, really wrong with him, like he might need to get his head looked at or something. It was a relief to lift Yoshiki out of the proceedings and see that the effect was still the same – stronger, even – but not a _huge_ relief.   
And now every time he saw Toshiya his guts contorted guiltily and some tiny spark in the pit of his stomach seemed to announce itself, making his skin feel extra-sensitive, like he was blushing all over. And he took cold showers and thought about gross things (thought about mucus, about sour milk, about the feeling of having a hair right at the back of his mouth), and he made it a firm rule that he wouldn't do anything else to make the problem go away.  
But still every time he felt filthier, as though there was some formerly clean and good part of himself that was starting to go bad, and to darken and rot and fall away.  
  
It had been summer when they'd left, and now it was autumn. The plane trees that lined the streets were beginning to take on a mottled, bare look, and the ginkgo Kaoru could see from his living room window was already flaring yellow. Before they were back in bud, Dir en Grey would have released a new single. Would have written and recorded most of their next album. Would have played more shows, and shot a live concert, and attended Yoshiki's annual New Year's Eve party.  
Kaoru sat down on his sofa. The quiet seemed to ring in his ears. He felt oddly light without people crammed in on either side of him, as if he might float apart. Everything was just as he'd left it: the sheaf of notes on the coffee table where he'd been playing around with some different song ideas, the acoustic guitar cradled on the sofa cushions next to him, a mug on the table with a dried ring of black coffee inside it. Everything was lightly fuzzed with dust, like the surface of a peach. A spider had made a web below the windowsill. His fern had died so completely that when he blew on it, the edges of the fronds disintegrated and scattered like ash.  
He'd slept on this sofa when he and Toshiya had fought that time. Or not slept. Tried to sleep. Gone into the bedroom and looked at _him_ sleeping, thought how young he looked and how undefended, his limbs tightly curled up as though he could barely fit. He didn't sleep that way any more; he spread out now, in hotel twin beds, exposing the white insides of his wrists and the line of his throat. Somewhere along the way, he must have grown more comfortable with them all.   
His palm seemed to tingle where Toshiya had bit him.

  
  


_It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star, an armoured space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy..._  
Even above the cinematic swell of the music, Kyo could hear the doorbell. At first, it seemed he would ignore it. He remained staunchly staring at the screen as it slowly dropped from a whole universe of stars to a dusty, dry, two-mooned planet; however, his brow was growing more and more furrowed, his frown deepening as his eyes narrowed almost to slits. With a sudden snarl of outrage, he punched the pause button on his remote control and heaved himself off the sofa and into the darkness; all the lights were off, all the curtains were drawn – he alone could navigate through the shadow maze of his dark, cramped apartment. Like Luke and Han steering through the asteroid field. Like Luke and Han...  
He wrenched the door open in a single short, blunt motion. His face was absolutely flat and free of expression, but when he saw his visitor, he frowned again.  
'I sense a disturbance in the force,' he intoned flatly, staring hard.   
It was Toshiya on his doorstep, flushed and panting heavily; he had obviously just run up the five flights of stairs that led to Kyo's place, and there was a little sweat glimmering on his forehead. He was carrying a paper bag full of cans of beer that, Kyo thought with a kind of sour triumph, were probably much too shaken up to be any good to anyone.   
They had been back from tour for two days. Kyo hadn't left his apartment yet.  
'Can I come in?' Toshiya asked breathlessly. Kyo folded his arms.   
'No.'   
'Go on.'  
'Toshiya. I've spent the past month on a minibus with you. I'm sore. I'm tired. I have a headache. I have tinnitus. I have—'  
'Thrush?' Toshiya teased. He was smiling, but it was strained. Under the sheen of sweat, Kyo noticed, he looked rather drawn and tired, as though he hadn't been sleeping. He looked damaged. Like a book left too long on the shelf of a shop, dog-eared and scuffed.   
'What do you want?' Kyo asked wearily, and Toshiya responded with a limp shrug.   
'I don't know. I felt sort of...' he hesitated, 'It was weird, not having anyone around. I just felt like talking to someone.'   
He held his bag of beer slightly aloft, as if it was going to buy him entry.  
'You know I don't drink.'   
'No, I know. I got some of the non-alcoholic ones, too.'   
'Vile,' Kyo said dismissively, but took a small step back that might, if you squinted, have been an invitation to enter. There was a long-suffering sort of stoop to his shoulders, which made him look smaller than ever, like an animal disturbed from its hibernation. He sneezed, and then lit a cigarette.   
'Here's the deal,' he said gruffly, 'You can come in. You can sit down. You can drink.' He took a sharp pull on his cigarette, and then used it to gesture sternly at Toshiya as he spoke, 'No. Talking. Silence. Sit in silence and watch the film.'   
Before him, Toshiya visibly brightened. Or maybe _brightened_ wasn't exactly it; he almost – _slackened_. He'd been holding his shoulders high and tense, and now he was relieved, so they fell.   
'Thanks,' he said, an embarrassing sincerity in his voice. 'Really.'   
'Whatever,' Kyo said violently.  
'What film are you watching, anyway? Kyo?'  
The vocalist had already disappeared back into the gloom of his apartment. He didn't think that question really dignified an answer.   
  
Three beers down and: 'Fuck, marry, kill,' Toshiya asked, squinting at the screen through the haze of cigarette smoke, 'Luke – Leia – or Han.'  
His face was illuminated only by the harsh blue-white light of the TV screen, but Toshiya still caught the look of consideration cross Kyo's face. He paused the film – the image of Alderaan halfway through its fiery destruction jumped and shimmered – and was quiet for a long time. He took a sip of the non-alcoholic beer even though he'd scathingly remarked that it tasted like if damp was a flavour.   
'Kill Han,' he said thoughtfully. 'Fuck Leia. Marry Luke.'   
'You'd marry Luke?'   
'There doesn't have to be anything romantic about it,' Kyo said pragmatically, sweeping cigarette ash from his lap, 'It could be a platonic marriage based on respect and friendship. I don't want to fuck Luke or Han. And if I had to fuck Luke and then married Leia, Luke's head would be messed up and he wouldn't be able to access the force. He'd lose against Darth Vader.'  
He gave Toshiya a sharp nudge. 'What about you?'  
'What about me?'  
'Luke, Han, and Leia.'   
'Oh.' Toshiya frowned. 'I...I guess I don't want to kill any of them.'  
'It's Leia. You'd kill Leia.'  
Toshiya's face coloured, but he didn't argue.  
'Fuck Han,' he said softly, 'Marry Luke.'   
There was a short silence.   
'Why?'  
'I'd fuck Han because he's so bossy. I...I kind of like that. And I'd marry Luke because he's good.'   
'Leia's good,' Kyo said plainly, and Toshiya sloshed his beer around in the can.  
'Don't be like that,' he said a little awkwardly. He sipped at it. It was warm and tasted of almost nothing.   
'Like what?' Kyo asked obtusely.  
'I – you know.' Toshiya tried to smile but it came out as a self-conscious grimace. He gestured lamely at the screen. 'I like...nice men,' he quoted. 'You know that.'   
There was a longer silence this time; a distinctly uncomfortable one. Kyo performed an almost imperceptible shift where he sat; to Toshiya, it felt massive. Before the vocalist had been sitting slouched right down, his legs spread wide, but now he was straightening up and pulling his limbs in. Their knees had been touching, but now they weren't. Kyo was inching away from him.  
'I – I just mean—'  
'Don't,' Kyo said tightly, staring at the screen even though it was still paused. 'I don't want to talk about that. All your queer stuff. Keep it to yourself.'  
With a decisive stab of the remote control, he unpaused the film and the wreckage of Alderaan blew outward in a flaming orbit.   
Toshiya sat quietly. He felt weird – sort of cold, even though Kyo's place was stuffy and, if anything, on the warm side. He felt hyper aware of his body, as though he was naked. He was very careful, whenever he shifted, not to touch Kyo at all.   
It was lucky that he'd seen the film before because he hardly took in the rest of it. He sat, and he smoked when Kyo did and pinched his lower lip into an anxious pleat, and when the film was over he left and he walked home in the early autumn dark.

  
  


What surprised them, Toshiya and Kaoru both, was that after all, it wasn't _that_ difficult to go on and pretend like everything was normal. They both showed up to practices and recording sessions and worked hard, and they both went to the right parties, and though their frequent fights didn't stop, they did change. They became less charged, less challenging; became disputes instead. Became more overtly about spurring the other on. Were easily settled by a moment of awkwardly smiling eye contact, an apologetic dip of the head.   
It was better, Kaoru told himself. It was mature. In a few months they even became friends, of a sort. The crushing, almost claustrophobic closeness that they'd shared had mellowed out into something easy, workable, sociable. Kaoru still held Toshiya at arm's length – that seemed to be best for everybody involved; safest – but in time, that twisting feeling he got in his stomach whenever he looked at him diminished slightly, if it didn't disappear altogether.   
And so the band worked. And so they recorded and played shows and released a second album, _Macabre_, a year later, and then started working on music for a third. And their live shows got a bigger budget. And the venues got larger. The hotels got better.   
It should have been the time of their lives, but the oddest thing was that when they both thought back to it, later – that strange, exciting era with everything happening at once – they would remember themselves as being unhappy. Being uncertain. Toshiya quieter, lonely, unsure; Kaoru lost, disoriented, distant: the two of them similar as ever, _stubborn_ as ever, all alone at the end of the century.

  
  



	13. Chapter 13

'It's strange, isn't it?'  
Toshiya's laugh was young, but fractured and splintered by the cold air it rose through. He touched Kaoru's elbow lightly, and the guitarist pulled his arms in closer towards his sides.  
'What's strange?' he asked absently, watching the white cloud of his breath join the grey cloud of his cigarette smoke; the two mingled for a moment before thinning, dispersing, and trailing up to the stars. It was a hard, cold, clear night, and he was shivering even inside his coat. In the near distance, a yellow car was being steadily hoisted up into the air by a crane.   
'All these people. All this—' he gestured self-consciously and did his nervous laugh again, 'All for us. They're going to destroy that car because of us; our band. I don't even have a car, and they're going to drop that one thirty feet and then blow it up.'   
'Huh,' Kaoru said dismissively, kicking at the frozen ground. Actually, it was pretty strange, when he thought about it. It was downright ludicrous.  
'A whole car,' Toshiya was saying dreamily, 'Boom! Gone. Just for five minutes of film that'll air a few times on Viewsic and MTV, and then be replaced. In a few years it won't even be dust. It'll be nothing, forgotten. But they're going to blow it up all the same. Because we told them to!'   
His laugh was so sudden and squawking that Kaoru had to smile at him, and shake his head.   
'You sound like you've been hanging around Kyo too much,' he said. He aimed to make his voice wry and sophisticated: it came out judgmental. 'You're not unhappy, are you?'   
'No, not really.' Toshiya paused, and lit a cigarette. He wasn't wearing gloves, Kaoru noticed, and his fingers were a vivid red in the floodlit night. The shadows on each of their faces were elongated, heavy-feeling; the bald white glare of the rented halogens made them both look vivid and vulnerable, like little animals caught in the highway-bound headlights of a freighter. Toshiya tucked some hair back, revealing a crimson-cold ear. His lips were that colour, too. He gave Kaoru a smile that he couldn't interpret, and Kaoru returned it as briefly as possible before turning away, rounding his shoulders defensively.   
Sometimes when Toshiya smiled at him it made him feel shy. It made him awkward, standoffish; made him turn inward instead of outward, as though the smile he had received was something to carefully secure, tucked away inside of himself, whilst he still had the time. Before anyone else could get at it.   
Kaoru gutted his cigarette and shoved his hands in his pockets. Toshiya, shrugging sort of meekly, walked away, back towards the quiet bustle of action around the car. Because Kaoru was still looking ahead at the crane he watched him go, his head and shoulders a straggled, slowly diminishing line in amongst all that cold.   
  
There was a wide ring marking where the explosion was set to take place, and most of the crew were wearing large sets of industrial headphones around their necks in anticipation of the moment they'd send the car up in smoke. It was cold, but it was the clean, sharp, pure kind of cold that Toshiya remembered from home; the type of cold where every breath felt like it was cutting his throat.  
He could sense, he thought, Kaoru's eyes. Not watching him because he interested him; just watching him because he was there, in his sight line. Because nothing more interesting was going on. He quite often felt Kaoru doing that: just watching him play his bass, or watching him stretch or sit or roam around the studio. The day after he'd first actually, properly had sex with a man – more than just giving head, or anything like that, the whole deal – he'd felt Kaoru's eyes on him like lasers, and he'd been scared that he'd somehow known. He'd felt vulnerable that day, raw and tender in a way he wasn't used to feeling as a man, as though something had been taken from him. He'd wanted so much to be touched; to be _held_, as stupid as that sounded, but of course there was nobody in the studio he could ask for that.   
But he'd been out of sorts, he guessed, all day, and around three o'clock Kaoru had somewhat clumsily handed him a cup of tea he'd picked up. As if he'd been unwell, or something.   
'Aren't you freezing, wearing that?'   
He blinked out of his reverie, a startled flurry of ash flying away from the tip of his cigarette and dissipating into the breeze. There was a young man in front of him, a little on the short side – or not short, exactly, but compact, Kaoru's sort of height – but cute, really cute, with a fashionably laid-back haircut and very straight white teeth and a dimple in his left cheek when he smiled. He was smiling now. He wore a heavy coat and gloves and a scarf and he had his shoulders rounded slightly against the chill. There was a laminated ID card hanging around his neck, but Toshiya didn't need to look at it to know that he was one of those energetic young people who populate every kind of shoot, from blockbuster movies to supermarket ads, scurrying around and running errands for anybody even slightly senior. An assistant's assistant.   
But he seemed nice. He did a little dancing shiver against the cold in a way that struck Toshiya as sweet, engaging. The way he was looking at Toshiya was a nice way to be looked at, sometimes, and Toshiya couldn't help but return his smile.   
'It's not too bad,' he replied, although he did hug his clothing tighter around his body, 'It gets cold like this where I grew up. I'm sort of used to it.'   
'So are you gonna stick around and watch them drop the car?'   
Toshiya smiled around his cigarette. 'Definitely. I'm actually kind of excited. Is that lame?'   
'Nah, it's more interesting than what I get to do most days.'   
'Me too.'   
The guy gave Toshiya a slantwise look. 'Aren't you a rockstar?'   
Toshiya was never very sure how to answer that question, so he shrugged in what he hoped was an attractive, mysterious way. He noticed that the guy had a tattoo peeking out from the slight gap between his sleeve and his glove, and boldly, he reached for it. He touched the inked part. It always surprised him that it didn't feel different from normal skin.   
'So how long are you here for?' the guy asked, his voice just a little more serious.   
'Just one night.'   
'Okay, Mr One Night. You want any, I don't know...company?'   
Reflexively, Toshiya performed a guilty glance over his shoulder for anybody who might have been in earshot.   
'I'd better not,' he said ruefully. 'My band – they don't...'   
Raised eyebrows. 'Oh.'  
But they smiled at each other, and Toshiya was conscious of the muscles around his shoulders relaxing slightly.  
'I'm Toshiya,' he said, and the guy's smile turned wry.   
'I know who you are. I'm Kaoru.'   
'_Oh_.'  
'Oh?'  
'Nothing. Sorry. It's just—' he gave an awkward sort of nod back towards where Kaoru was still standing, his attention focussed straight down on his cell phone now, 'His name is Kaoru, too. And he's kind of...we don't always get on.'   
'Well,' the other Kaoru said reasonably, 'We're getting on.'   
They smiled at each other.   
'How do you know who I am without knowing who he is, anyway?' Toshiya asked curiously, and Kaoru gave a slightly embarrassed sort of shrug.   
'I saw your band on TV once, but I only really remembered you. Your name. You were the one I was watching.'   
The look he gave him was suddenly piercing. 'Listen,' he said in a quick, hushed voice, 'If you want, we can go inside the lighting trailer. It's warm, and it's more private. We can have a few minutes.'  
'What can you do in a few minutes?'   
'I can make you cum,' Kaoru said blithely.   
Toshiya didn't really have to consider it.   
'So long as I don't miss the car falling,' he murmured, and Kaoru grinned.   
'I guarantee it.'   
  
The trailer seemed much smaller on the inside, like the Tardis in reverse. As soon as they were inside and the door closed behind them, Kaoru took hold of Toshiya's hand. The air smelled like dust and nothing.   
Quietly, they picked their way across the floor; it was so cluttered with lighting equipment and coiled piles of cabling that there was barely space to step. A huge control panel occupied most of the back of the trailer, and with a tucked, secretive sort of smile, this was where Kaoru led him, guiding him by their joined hands and showing him the tiny space they could wriggle through to get in behind it. It was dim, and much dirtier than the rest of the trailer.   
Kaoru lay him down on the floor. He kissed him once, on the mouth, and then on the neck. He touched his chest, and his waist. He got his belt undone one-handed; pulled the zip down on his jeans. There was a cold blast of air as the door to the trailer opened and closed, and Toshiya pressed his lips firmly together, holding his breath. It banged closed again, and his heart raced dizzily. He kissed Kaoru just for the feeling of kissing someone; his dick got hard, pushing up against the front of his underwear, the tip of it visible over the waistband.  
'You've got a big cock,' Kaoru said in a whisper, 'Mind if I taste it?'  
In the back of the trailer, Toshiya closed his eyes. He could feel the cold hardness of the floor through his thin jacket; he could feel the way his hips rose, his lips parted, his fingers coiled in some fold of Kaoru's clothing. He felt cool air against the warmest parts of his skin; threw an arm over his own face and bit down hard on his own wrist to stifle the sounds he wanted to make as Kaoru licked at him.   
There was a single window, high up, slatted. White light from the floodlights outside fell in jail cell lines across their hideout. When he opened his eyes he saw Kaoru's head bent over him and the always slightly surreal view of his own cock being engulfed by another person's body; Kaoru's lips were chapped from the cold but his mouth was warm and eager. He had yanked his gloves off and one hand was fisted around the base of Toshiya's dick, pumping him slowly; his other hand was stuffed down inside his own pants, stroking himself off at the same rhythm.  
'That feels so good,' Toshiya whispered.  
They had to be quiet. It was important to be fast. At times they heard footsteps in the trailer and buzzing voices, and Toshiya would bite down on his own lip to muffle the small noises he was making every time his cock hit the back of Kaoru's throat, or every time Kaoru moaned around his cock, or sucked hard on the tip; at other times they were alone in the quiet and Toshiya found himself panting the other man's name, feeling strangely naughty just to have it spilling from his lips. Sinful. No, what was the word? _Taboo_. An image of Kaoru's disapproval crossed his mind and his hips surged upwards before he could stop them.   
'Kaoru,' he breathed harshly.   
When he let his eyes fall closed, the bright slats of light were burnt onto the backs of his eyelids.   
'_Kaoru_—'  
He was going to cum; he could feel it building. He struggled, tried to push himself halfway upright; his head spun dizzily and just for a split second he could have sworn the black hair became blond, the open face became narrow and guarded, disapproving, angry, dominant—  
'Kaoru, I'm gonna cum, I'm gonna—'  
He drew back and Toshiya's cum clipped him on the jaw and across the lips so his smile shone a pearly, glossy white in the moonlight; up on his knees he gripped Toshiya's shoulder for support, his other hand still working at himself; Toshiya held him, stroked the hair back from his face, and with a quiet sort of groan Kaoru shuddered and stilled, his cum blotting into Toshiya's T-shirt.  
Silence. They were both breathing heavily. After a short moment Kaoru sat properly upright and smiled at him breathlessly, swiping cum from his face; they kissed once, clumsily, and Toshiya felt wetness smear against his chin where he'd missed a bit.   
'That was—'  
'Yeah.'   
Quietly they zipped and belted themselves, pulling clothing into place, straightening hair. Toshiya wiped his chin with the back of his hand.  
'So.' Kaoru still sounded a little breathless; he tucked some hair behind his ear. 'Mr One Night. Do I get to see you again?'  
'That'd be good.'  
'You guys are in Tokyo, right?'  
Oh. Toshiya rubbed at his chin again worriedly.   
'No, we're based in Osaka.'   
'Oh.'   
They looked at each other a little awkwardly for a few moments, and then Kaoru boosted himself athletically to his feet, offering a hand to help Toshiya up as well. It felt more difficult to get out from behind the control panel than it had been to get there in the first place; Toshiya felt a claustrophobic sort of tightness band around his chest.  
'They'll be dropping the car soon, I guess. You don't want to miss it,' Kaoru told him, and Toshiya nodded. It would be good to be outside; to have all that air. He felt greedy for it.   
Still, at the door, he hesitated.   
'Hey,' he said quietly, 'Thanks for everything. You were great.'   
The door swung wide and the cold air stiffened his face up like a mask.   
'If you're ever in Tokyo...'   
And then, smiling dangerously, Kaoru planted a tiny kiss, lightning-fast, on his cheek. 'Good to meet you, Toshiya.'   
'Good to meet you too, Kaoru.' As he dropped down the step and back onto solid ground, he felt Kaoru's gloved hand land squarely on his ass – just a light slap, and a squeeze, that made him turn around and smile weakly up into the other man's face. But somehow they were no better than the dimmest acquaintances, now, and Kaoru was gazing over his shoulder.  
'Hey, look,' he said, pointing, 'Your friend's been looking for you.'  
And Toshiya's gaze slid from one Kaoru to the other. And that old Kaoru's dark, searching eyes took in the two of them, the guilt that wrapped around them, the incriminating hand on Toshiya's rear.  
And that old Kaoru's eyes widened. And his face darkened. And he threw a quick, disgusted glance at Toshiya, and he walked away.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, guys. But hey, the more feedback I get, the faster I go. I eat delicious attention.


	14. Chapter 14

It wasn't much of a wrap party.   
The video had been shot way out in the sticks, and apparently the only place around that was still open at that hour of the night was the fairly grotty bar in the fairly grotty hotel they were booked into. It was a strange kind of place, a guesthouse staffed by a grumpy hostess, a duo of apparently mute chambermaids and a sleepy bartender, apparently being kept from his bed by their late return; he yawned and glowered and poured them mean servings of Kirin in cloudy glassware. There was also evidently a cook, but he had not yet appeared outside of the kitchen.  
Kaoru swallowed his first two beers swiftly and was ordering his third whilst the others were still chattering and laughing over their first round. Kyo was animatedly reliving the explosion, gesticulating so violently that Shinya had to snatch their glasses out of the way; he was laughing though, politely, with his mouth covered, whilst Die horsed around miming rescue helicopters and unlikely passers-by getting caught in the blast and bursting, shrieking, into flames.   
By comparison, Toshiya's smile was dim and anxious, and he hovered uncertainly around their edges; he sat not crushed onto the banquette with them but on a stool he'd dragged over – not his style at all. His eyes kept flicking back to Kaoru, trying nervously to read the emotional weather on his face: Kaoru ignored him. He would talk to Toshiya, but later, behind closed doors. That would be the professional thing to do.   
He wondered if it was normal to feel actual distaste for your own bandmate. He watched the way Toshiya's long-fingered hands tangled themselves together, tapped agitatedly against the side of his glass; he watched the way he bit repeatedly at his lower lip, but when Toshiya's skittish eyes landed on his own, Kaoru simply blinked past him. Pulled the shades down, like he wasn't even there.   
  
'Let's go _out_,' Die was saying, waving his hands around as though he was swatting at mosquitoes, 'There's got to be somewhere we can go _out_.' His voice had taken on a whiny sort of cadence, and Kyo jostled him with a tucked, secretive sort of smile on his face. Not a comforting sight.   
'It's quite late,' Shinya said sensibly, 'Why don't you just go out when we get back to the city?'  
'Shinya, Shinya, Shinya.' Die shook his head magnificently, leaning across to pinch Shinya's chin in between his fingers, 'You're a sweet, _sweet_ boy, but you just don't understand. I've just got to move, I've got to fly—'  
'You've got to _drink_,' Shinya rebuked sourly, and Kyo gave a strange bark of a laugh.  
'What about you?' Die elbowed Kyo in the ribs, 'You'll come with me, won't you?'  
'It's quite late,' Kyo parroted, that same smirk on his face.  
'Kyo!' Die's voice suggested that the singer had just slapped his mother right in front of him, 'Come _on_.'  
There was a protracted period of Die attempting to charm Kyo – really just clasping his hands under his chin and fluttering his eyelashes in a way that made him look as though somebody was blowing a strong wind into his face – before Kyo gave a shrug that was, conceivably, interpretable as a yes, and Die whooped victoriously before turning his expectant eyes onto Shinya.   
'Whaddaya say?'  
'Honestly, you never _listen_, Die. It's too late now.'   
'Shinya's worrying about the bogeyman getting us,' Kyo intoned.   
'Yeah?' Die grinned, 'The bogeyman, is that right, Shin?'   
'Well, I don't think he'd want a pair as ugly as you, but be careful anyway. _I'm_ going to take a bath.'   
'Jinkies,' Kyo said lowly.  
'Safest way,' Die said cheerfully. He leant over the table to pinch Shinya's cheek – or at least, he made a manful attempt at it; the drummer squirmed away, almost comically affronted. 'He'd snap you right up; you're such a little cutie-pie—'  
'Don't do that! I _hate_ it when you do that!'  
Kaoru watched this exchange blankly, taking long drinks from his glass. Those mocking tones, those whining tones, that unsophisticated laughter; it was the sound of friendship, and on that evening it made him feel strange; mournful, sort of. He wondered why he and Toshiya could never have that. He wondered why they always had to be so apart, and so different.   
  
Sadly, quietly, they eyed each other across the table. Their twin dark gazes effortlessly pushed through the mess of hands and glassware and laughter between them: in their frank and stubborn eyes, war was declared. Oblivious as the other three were playing, they must have known something was up: Die had not bothered to try and cajole them into coming out on the town with him, after all. Normally Toshiya would have been his first port of call, an arrangement that Kaoru witheringly referred to as _partners in crime_ due to their complete inability to have a normal night together.   
But not tonight.   
Toshiya felt angry; almost yelling angry. When he lifted his glass to drown the dregs of his beer he had the impression that he was stuffing that bad feeling down along with it, swallowing it even though it made him feel bloated and sick. Angry Kaoru was one thing, but this icy silence was quite another; the way he had sat there, drinking, looking through him. He was reminded forcibly of his parents' divorce; the way the two of them could lower the temperature of a room just by existing in it at the same time; the way he had never been warm enough, radiant enough, _anything_ enough, to defrost their little family before it shattered.   
He risked a glance over at Kaoru and started slightly; the other man had ceased to gaze through him or even glare directly at him and was instead staring down at the table, one delicate finger tracing little patterns in the drinks that Die and Kyo had spilled during their boisterous re-enactment of the explosion. It was difficult to define, but something about the guitarist's face looked stranger, softer – so distant. So _not there_, somehow.   
And then he snapped to, and his face turned back to stone. His brow furrowed and his gaze shoved back against Toshiya's roughly.  
With a scrape of wood over tile, Toshiya pushed his chair back and announced that he was exhausted, completely done in; he was going to bed.   
'Me too.'   
Kaoru drained the last of his drink and stood up himself, eyeing Toshiya solidly over the heads of their friends.   
'Good night, everybody.'   
'Good night.'   
  
The hotel had a cold, draughty, dirty staircase. The steps were concrete and their footfalls echoed, as if to emphasise the silence between them. Toshiya led the way to his room and unlocked it silently, revealing twin beds covered with identical dowdy and yet grotesquely floral spreads. The one window was uncurtained and a single dim bulb filled the room with a wincing, migraine-inducing yellow light. It was shielded by a buff-coloured paper shade. Something was printed in green around its rim and Kaoru squinted to read it, but all it said was _recycled paper recycled paper recycled paper_ over and over.   
As he watched, Toshiya threw himself down on one of those weirdly dingy-yet-florid beds and stared blankly up at the ceiling for a moment. He looked exhausted, Kaoru thought. He lay for a long moment, not talking, and then dragged himself into a sitting position and began sorting violently through his ancient-looking suitcase. He yanked out a faded T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, a bottle of aspirin, and a bottle of jewel-coloured liquid that sloshed enticingly. He unscrewed the pill bottle and swallowed two of them dry – something that always made Kaoru shudder to watch. He tucked the clothing he'd gathered into the crook of his arm and gave Kaoru a cold look.  
'I'm taking a shower,' he said flatly. 'Stay if you want; I don't care.'   
'What's that?' Kaoru asked in an equally blank voice, nodding towards the bottle.  
'Forgotten how to read, have you? It's Suntory.'   
'Well at least you're buying local,' Kaoru said acidly, but Toshiya was already swinging the bathroom door closed behind him. He didn't slam it, but the snap of the lock when it was shut felt just as pointed. The water started up almost straight away, and with a soft sigh Kaoru sat down on Toshiya's bed. The mattress was far too soft, soupy in the middle like an undercooked cake, and he and the suitcase swayed towards each other companionably. He ran his fingers over it: it was plastic, cheap, the same one he'd brought with him to Osaka for the first time, all those years ago. It was all he'd had, apart from his bass: Kaoru hadn't thought anything of it at the time, but now the idea made him feel a little flurry of panic. He would have been scared, he thought, to be drifting around the country so lightly; to be so uninsulated. His own apartment was crowded with objects: clothes he'd bought to look cooler, rugs he'd purchased to try to make his rented space look homey (this was unsuccessful), plants that had withered and died in his care. His walls were almost entirely papered over with posters – like a _teenager_, he thought now, with a surprisingly strong flash of self-loathing – showing not just musicians and fantasy guitars but also Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde, Amuro Ray, the blood-splattered smiley face logo of _Watchmen_, a red-lit cityscape of _Akira_'s Neo Tokyo.  
He rubbed his hands over his eyes and forehead and then dragged his fingernails down his cheeks, breathing in deeply. Toshiya had left his suitcase open, spewing tangled garments and CDs over the bed; gently, Kaoru closed it. He rain a pensive finger over its surface and his nail caught an ancient scratch on its surface, perhaps gouged in by a pen – yes, and the ink had faded over the months and months of dragging the case around but the impression was still there, faint and barely legible, and Kaoru found himself tugging the suitcase into the light and scrutinising it closely.  
_I'm not here_, he read with difficulty; the characters were blurred and distorted. _And this isn't happening_.   
Even scratched into a suitcase, he could recognise Toshiya's handwriting. He often caught himself expecting it to be big and messy, as full as jittery energy as the man himself; it was always a surprise to see it so small and neatly formed; so precise.   
_I'm not here and this isn't happening. _  
He remembered one of his late nights in the studio, early on, the windows all fogged over by the sweat of their efforts. Just him and Toshiya had been left; the two of them rumpled, tired, white-faced from determination and lack of sleep. And just over Toshiya's shoulder he had seen that same phrase, daubed with that same precise hand into the mist on the windowpane. It seemed his eyes had skittered over it then, and he had gone right back to the task at hand – it might have been running Toshiya's ideas for the bass line of Kiri to Mayu, if he remembered right – but now it sort of sucked all the air out of him, left him small and depleted.   
He wondered how lost and lonely somebody would have to feel, to want to cling onto a thought like that. He tried to summon up an image of Toshiya back in those days but it kept fading and changing, presenting him at different, less challenging times: Toshiya drunk, flushed and giggling with a hand tented secretively around his mouth, confessing to Kaoru in a hot whisper that he'd once been told to write a poem in school but had submitted the full lyrics to _Love Shack_ instead; Toshiya onstage, his bass pulled up along the length of his legs and body, his knees wide apart and his spine slouched as he played; Toshiya naked in a neon blue swimming pool, skin fever-coloured despite the cold night, blinking up at Kaoru with a smile on his face.  
The bathroom door opened. In a cloud of steam the current Toshiya came wandering out into the bedroom, dressed in the boxers and T-shirt he'd brought in with him and towel-drying his hair idly. Kaoru bowed his head, knuckled his eyes hard, grit his teeth behind the protective fall of his hair as Toshiya sat carefully down on the bed opposite (Die's bed, his overnight bag dumped unceremoniously in the centre of it). He'd thought he'd known exactly what to say, but now everything felt uncertain. His insides felt light and jittery, the beating of his heart a soft skip. He was blushing.  
_What the fuck is wrong with you?_  
He steadied himself. Licked his dry lips. His hands were trembling slightly but he squeezed them until they stopped. He was relieved to find that when he spoke, his voice was perfectly calm and level. It irritated him that he had expected anything less.   
  
'I suppose you know,' he started slowly, carefully, 'That you took a stupid, insane risk tonight. I suppose you know that you were gambling the future of this whole band, of your _friends_, on – on five minutes of gratification.'  
'You're quick to be a little hypocrite, Kaoru.'   
Deep sigh. 'What's that supposed to mean?' Not sounding angry, really; sounding more tired. Toshiya crossed his arms, studying the guitarist sharply.   
'It means exactly what it sounds like,' he said obstinately. 'It means I don't get why it's fine for you all to take girls back after shows and fuck them as you please – god, I've walked in on Die getting _head_ before – but when _I_—'  
'It's not the same, and you know it.'   
'No,' Toshiya said smoothly, running the towel over his damp hair one last time and then dropping it on the bed next to him, 'No, sorry, but I _don't_ know. Why _isn't_ it the same?'  
'Toshiya.'   
'No, come one, tell me. How is it different?'  
'This is so fucking stupid—'  
'_Tell me_,' Toshiya ordered, almost snarling. He leant back on his hands, eyeing Kaoru challengingly, 'C'mon, I want to know. I want to know exactly what's so _bad_ and _different_ about what I did.'   
Kaoru met his eye wearily and, in a defeated sort of voice, he said, 'It's not the same because it was with a man. You know what would happen if you were caught; what the media would do with that. They'd assume we were all like that, and it would ruin us.'   
If that had been what Toshiya had wanted, his face didn't show it; his lips had thinned where he pressed them together, and he gave a terse nod.   
'Right,' he said shortly, 'I suppose you saw all the press attention I got, then, did you? On our _closed set_, in the middle of nowhere? Saw all those cameras flashing; all those interviews I was giving, did you?'  
'Just because there was no press around—'  
Toshiya interrupted him with a derisive laugh, and Kaoru felt a muscle in his jaw start to pulse.   
'_Just because there was no press_,' Toshiya mimicked him loudly, 'Do you _hear_ yourself? God, it was _one fucking blowjob_—'  
'Just because there was no press, it doesn't mean that what you did was risk free,' Kaoru continued doggedly, 'And I need you to understand that, for all our sakes. There were people there; people we don't know. There were cameras – there might even have been a security camera inside that trailer; did you think of that? Or were you too concerned with just – getting off?'  
'Oh wow,' Toshiya said venomously, 'You make it sound so romantic.'   
'Sorry,' Kaoru retorted icily, 'Did he swear endless love to you? Get down on one knee? Because to me it looked like a five minute fumble in a dirty trailer with a man you barely know; with somebody you have no _idea_ whether or not you can trust. What if he hadn't – hadn't been – what if he wasn't _like_ you? What then? You would have hit on him and he would've been disgusted and _then_ where would we be?'  
'God, spare me the _dramatics_,' Toshiya said disgustedly, 'For one thing, _he_ came on to _me_, and for another, do you _really_ think I can't tell when the guy making eyes at me is gay?'  
'You can?'  
For some reason that made Kaoru's heart beat faster, pounding sickly in his chest. Toshiya snorted.   
'A fat chance I'd have had surviving to adulthood if I couldn't,' he muttered darkly.  
  
Kaoru didn't have anything to say to that. He didn't feel much like looking at Toshiya, either. He fell back to studying his hands; the way they were clasped, white-knuckled, over his knees.   
Toshiya smoothed some damp hair over his shoulder, feeling a grim sort of victory.   
'Are we done, then?' he asked, his voice pointed but weary. Kaoru was quiet for a moment.   
'Promise you won't do it again.'   
Kaoru's voice was muffled because his head was hanging so low, and he didn't see the way Toshiya hesitated for a moment and then gave his head a small, tight shake.   
'I can't promise that,' he said woodenly. 'No.'  
Kaoru's shoulders stiffened slightly but he nodded, like he had expected nothing different.   
'Then please,' he said tiredly, 'Please at least be more discreet.'   
'As I recall, the only person who saw me was _you_.'   
'Well, I'd prefer not to,' Kaoru snapped back tensely. 'I don't want to see – _that_.'   
Toshiya's eyebrows shot upwards. 'I'm sorry,' he said, the tone of his voice suggesting that he was not sorry at all, 'Does what I do _offend_ you?'  
'I – it's just—' Kaoru scrubbed an agitated hand over his face, 'You don't seem to get how _lucky_ you are, that the four of us – I mean, that nobody minds, that everyone's okay with it.'   
Actually, Toshiya was not at all convinced that Die or Shinya knew. He was mildly amazed that Kaoru had caught on prior to that evening: he'd figured Kaoru would have assumed the whole situation with Yoshiki was borne of pure ambition, Toshiya's willingness needing no other explanation – which it had been, in fact. Now the thought that Kaoru might have assumed otherwise made him feel uncomfortable.   
As for Kyo, well. _I don't want to talk about that. All your queer stuff. Keep it to yourself_. The words slid around gelatinously in Toshiya's head, slippery as egg white. Worse than the words was the way he'd refused to look at him; the way he'd shifted his body away, like he didn't want them to touch.   
'Excuse me,' Toshiya said dully, and Kaoru met his gaze unhappily.   
'I just mean that everything's – you know, it's all right, now. And I don't want you to alienate yourself, or make people feel uncomfortable.'   
'_People_,' Toshiya said baldly, 'Or you?'  
Kaoru had the grace to look away, but he needn't have bothered. Toshiya got to his feet and walked idly over to the window, pushing it open and letting in a blast of freezing night air; standing there, his rigid back to Kaoru, he lit up a cigarette. His hands were shaking slightly, he noticed.   
'I'd like you to leave now,' he said.   
'Toshiya—'  
'No, really, get out.'   
'You're being—'  
'_How_?' Toshiya snapped, whirling around, '_How_ am I being? Am I being like somebody who fucks boys instead of girls? Because that's not going to change, Kaoru, however badly you want it to. It's _not_ going to change. So get out. You're a hypocrite, and I don't want to waste my time with hypocrites. Get _out_.'   
Silence. Toshiya struggled against the desire to say more, but held himself steady. He made himself turn back around; it was very cold by the window. The frigid air made his eyes water, and he blinked angrily.   
In time, he heard Kaoru get to his feet. His movements were quiet, hushed and shuffling; Toshiya could hear his guilt, but it wasn't enough. Silence, silence. And then—  
'Why did you have to be that way, the night we first met?'  
Spoken so softly, Toshiya almost could have imagined it.  
'It was – because you pushed me, I had to push back. I—'  
Silence. Toshiya swallowed; it was bitter tasting. His fingernails sunk shakily into the skin of his forearm, making little white crescent-moon indentations, and though for a moment he thought that Kaoru would say more, at length he heard the opening and then the closing of his hotel room door, and finally he was alone.


	15. Chapter 15

'Ohhh, this is so stupid.'   
Already belted up and ready to go in the minivan, Die was twisting and contorting in his seat in a desperate attempt to see out of the back window: Kyo and Shinya were present and correct, nestled in either side of him, but Kaoru and Toshiya were still lingering by the hotel door. By the looks of it, they were having some sort of hushed and urgent talk – saying whatever they felt couldn't be said in the van with the rest of the band, which made Die feel slightly uneasy.   
'D'you think they're arguing again?'  
The impact of Kyo's answering eye roll was somewhat diminished by the dark glasses he wore, but Die seemed to pick up on it: he cleared his throat edgily.   
'What d'you think it's about this time?'  
'Maybe something happened at the shoot,' Shinya suggested sensibly, giving a little wriggle where he sat: the morning air was very cold and the three of them were huddled up inside their winter jackets, adding to the back seat crush. 'They weren't acting like themselves last night. And I was rooming with Kaoru; he wasn't there when I went up.'  
'But they left before us,' Die said, with the air of a great detective piecing together a mystery, 'Both of them said they were going to bed. They lied.'  
'I feel like our parents are getting divorced,' Kyo commented drily, turning to scrutinise his missing band members, 'Or maybe not...' he narrowed his eyes, watching as Kaoru and Toshiya argued. He could tell that was what they were doing by the way they stood; Toshiya had his legs braced and his hands on his hips, his chest thrust out defiantly; Kaoru had his arms folded tightly over his chest and a supremely unimpressed look on his face.   
'Maybe not?'  
'Maybe it's not a divorce exactly. Maybe daddy's having an affair.'   
'_What_?' Die and Shinya spoke as a single unified voice, and Kyo's lips cracked into an unhealthy sort of smile.  
'They must have been in Toshiya's room. Toshiya would have had it to himself; Die was downstairs with me, being a prat.'   
'Hey!'   
'Well, you were. And they were up there alone together for long enough.'   
'Yeah,' Die said sarcastically, 'Except – oh, _wait_ – except that they _hate_ each other.'   
'Not always,' Kyo said shrewdly, and lapsed into a thoughtful silence; under his watchful gaze, Toshiya reached out and gave Kaoru a little push; not a shove or anything like that, really more of a nudge, but too much all the same. Kaoru caught his wrists up in a white-knuckled grip, seeming to snarl something into his face before letting Toshiya go with such force that he stumbled backwards. That was that, then; Kaoru turned on his heel and stormed off towards the minibus, leaving Toshiya rubbing his wrists with a sour look on his face. After a moment he followed, apparently muttering to himself; the three in the back quickly sat up straight and rearranged their facial expressions to look carefully neutral, as if they had all three slipped into a kind of mutual coma. With the back seats taken, Toshiya and Kaoru were forced to sit next to each other in the front row – something that, based on their grim expressions, they were none too happy about – and Shinya and Die exchanged worried glances.   
  
'Kaoru told me,' Shinya murmured under the cover of the engine's rattling as they pulled away, 'That he wasn't in the room when I came up because he went to check out the fire escape routes.'  
'It's true he does that,' Die mused quietly, 'Though when you think about it, compulsively checking the emergency exits sounds sort of like a problem as well...'   
The three of them watched as, in almost perfect sync, Kaoru and Toshiya each slid a pair of headphones over their ears.   
'That's a lie though,' Kyo said smartly, 'he does that as soon as he checks in.'   
There was a pregnant pause, during which Die shook his head in a bemused kind of way.   
'Well, they probably just wanted somewhere private to fight,' Shinya said sensibly.   
'They've never felt embarrassed about arguing in front of us before.'   
'It's probably something completely fucking stupid,' Die said resolutely. 'Completely unrelated. Like maybe they were...I dunno, planning a surprise party, or something.'   
There was a stunned silence, and then Kyo and Shinya both broke up into laughter: Kyo giving a loud, ungainly cackle and Shinya covering his mouth with his hand, his eyes closed tight as his shoulders shook quietly. It was Kyo's harsh laugh that caused the headphones to slip off and the two scowling faces in front to turn around; it wasn't a sound they heard often, and it was certainly an odd one.   
'That's bound to be it, Die,' Kyo said, apparently recovered, 'And the best part of you ran down your father's leg.'   
'Sure,' Die said comfortably, 'But look how much good stuff was left. And I was just thinking—'  
'No you weren't,' Kyo cut him off witheringly, 'You just thought you were thinking.'  
Despite the thunderous look that had been on Toshiya's face, that startled a little snort out of him. It changed his face entirely; he looked suddenly much younger. He smiled at them a little warily, unsnapping his seatbelt so that he could lean over the back of his chair.  
'So,' he said, with the air of somebody trying to appear effortless, 'How was last night?'  
'You should have come,' Die said instantly, 'We had a laugh—'  
'It was not a laugh,' Kyo corrected him shortly, 'We drove around for _hours_—'  
'_One_ hour!' Die cut in, looking scandalised, 'We were just looking for something, you know, a bar or something.'   
'An _hour_ away?'   
'Kyo drives like the road's made of glass.'   
'How was your night?' Shinya asked smartly, his voice rather more assertive than usual. Toshiya wasn't alone in looking taken-aback; Kyo had grown peculiarly still, and Die was looking at the drummer with a bemused, impressed sort of look on his face. With a sigh, Kaoru had turned back around. He had slid his headphones back over his ears, but there was a tenseness to the back of his neck that suggested he might have been listening very, very hard.  
'I went to bed early,' Toshiya said cagily, 'I was tired.'   
'You didn't – see Kaoru wandering around the corridors?' Shinya probed. Toshiya fixed his eyes to the seat back in front of him, picking the stuffing from it distractedly, but – it couldn't be Shinya's imagination – his cheeks had started to look rather red, as though he was too hot.  
'No,' he said neutrally.  
'Warm in here?' Shinya continued forcefully, and Die gave him a none-too-subtle dig in the ribs. The drummer blinked suddenly, as if he had just snapped out of some sort of enchantment, and gave Die a chastened sort of look.  
'You should have come along,' Die said, as if the conversation had never changed, 'We could only find one place open, and it was a bit more you than us.'   
'More me?' Toshiya said vaguely, sounding for all the world like his thoughts were somewhere else, very far away. Die grinned, sweeping a shy hand through his crimson hair; he looked uncharacteristically flustered, and his affable smile was more sheepish than usual.   
'Well – it was—'  
'It was a queer bar,' Kyo said flatly, stretching so that his back made a loud cracking noise. He paused, eyeing Toshiya lucidly. 'Don't you go to places like that?'  
There was a painful silence. Toshiya opened his mouth and closed it again, his flush deepening by the second; a dozen wrong answers struggled on his lips, but at that moment Kaoru rounded on the four of them and ordered Toshiya to sit back down; to get his seatbelt buckled, he was making him nervous.  
'We're not going to crash,' Kyo said irritably, but Kaoru shut him up with a look.  
'You don't know that. Everything can change in a moment,' he said, his voice deep and calm and sounding very firm, all of a sudden. He turned back to face the front, his knuckles just lightly brushing against the back of Toshiya's hand where it lay on the seat. An accident, of course. He gave a stiff apology, under his breath, like a prayer.   
Behind him, though, Kyo was sitting up very straight. And behind his dark glasses, his eyes were very, very sharp.  
  
By the time they were halfway home, a good half of the people in the minibus had fallen asleep: Die almost instantly, Shinya after perhaps half an hour of silence, and Kaoru most recently. Kyo might have been, too; who knew, with his eyes covered. He certainly looked the part – he was leant right back in his seat with his hands loosely curled in his lap – but if there was one thing Toshiya had learned from the singer, it was that appearances could be deceiving.  
Every few minutes Die let out a few quiet, snorting little snores. Up in the front, their driver had turned the radio way down low, and over the hum of the engine and the rattling of the ancient suspension over the road surface, Toshiya could hardly make out the music. He shifted uncomfortably, feeling alternately hot and cold; feeling Kyo's eyes on him even though he was sixty, seventy percent sure the vocalist was asleep.  
Whatever point Kyo was trying to make, Toshiya didn't get it, and it was making his head hurt. Though it was true that Kyo wasn't exactly a _warm_ person, and he often grew reticent in company, Toshiya had never known him to speak to another person so antagonistically. Aggressively, yes; _snidely_, no. It was as if he was trying to goad Toshiya into something that he had no intention of starting himself – some kind of fight or confession that would upset the delicate balance of their little band.  
  
Toshiya sighed and turned to look out of the window, but the landscape was a great flat load of nothing and so he turned back to Kaoru. The older man was drowsing – his head had been nodding over his reading for a good ten minutes – and now the book he held loosely in his lap threatened to slip out of his hands. It was funny how young he looked, Toshiya thought. All Toshiya had to do was mentally dye the blond hair violet, and he could have been looking at Kaoru back when they first released Gauze. That felt like a long, long time ago, when they were all still impossibly young, but it couldn't have been really.  
He sighed softly and eased the book out of his bandmate's hands, saving his place before it got lost.  
It felt peculiar that both Kyo and Kaoru had, after all, said pretty similar things to him: be discreet, keep it to yourself, I don't want to hear about it. Thinking about it made him feel prickly and hostile towards them both, but he knew that if he had to throw his lot in with just one of them, it would have to be Kaoru. And he couldn't really say _why_ exactly except for that he thought, given the chance, Kaoru might be fairer. Both men had a wildcard kind of natural authority to them, but Kaoru's was gentler; it was an authority that listened.  
He shifted in his seat. Sleeping, Kaoru was far less staunch about defending his personal space; his arm was pressed up against Toshiya's from his shoulder down to his elbow; his knee tapped Toshiya's lightly every time the minivan swayed around a right turn. The long ponytail of black hair he'd so far avoided cutting off was spilling out over his collar, the hair shining in the weak sunlight; all of their hair had been so processed by this point – bleached and stripped and dyed and dyed again, bleached again, curled and straightened and doused in clouds of noxious-smelling spray – that Toshiya kind of liked that Kaoru had left this one long lock untouched. When he carefully touched it, it was soft; it unfolded beneath his fingers.   
It made his body feel warmer. His heart was taking up an anxious little knocking rhythm against his ribs, like it wanted out. Kaoru's face was so soft like this, so open; the shape of his lips was so elegant and precise and they were just slightly parted, like he was about to speak, like he was mulling over his words the way he always did, second-guessing every single part of himself except the part that came out onstage or in the studio, the guitar in his hands like a talisman.  
And Toshiya wanted to kiss him.   
It wasn't exactly a new idea. Rather, it was a feeling that came to him every so often: when they toured and he saw Kaoru onstage, smiling kind of at the crowd but mostly just into the darkness; when Kaoru was in his element in the studio, bossing everyone around with his low, commanding voice; when he caught Kaoru watching him, the feeling of having those eyes silently, lightly sweep over his body and then linger over his face, studying him, whilst he pretended not to notice.   
Sometimes he felt as though every time he'd considered just walking out of the band, that gaze had kept him pinned in place. Not that he really thought about leaving very seriously any more – he had the only slightly uncomfortable feeling that his fate was completely tied up with these four other men now, for better or for worse – but it was a soothing option to present himself with on the really bad days.  
He looked at Kaoru's face: at the narrow lines of his cheekbones, the way his eyelashes trembled just softly against his skin. He liked the shape of his nose; it was almost western-looking, he'd thought the first time he'd ever laid eyes on him, and even then it had struck him as somehow sophisticated, somehow _other_. Like he was standing in the rainy Nagano night, but he might have been from somewhere better.   
He wondered what Kaoru would think if he could hear Toshiya's thoughts.   
He'd hate him, probably. He'd never want to speak to him again. He'd look at the way they were sitting, pressed up so close together, and shrink back just like Kyo had.   
Toshiya sighed, turning his head away to press his forehead against the window. His breath misted up the glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope we're all keeping safe and well, guys. My country is finally in lockdown, and we have a small heatwave going on. It's really strange. The streets are so empty and sunlit and quiet, but everybody is out in their gardens, like all their households have suddenly split open.


	16. Chapter 16

In the fading golden light of another wintry afternoon, Kyo lowered his notebook to his knees and pressed his lips together, stretching out his neck with a satisfying popping noise. He had been writing for what felt like hours – all the same song but endlessly editing, deleting, scratching in fresh words over the tops of those that didn't work – and he felt heady and faintly dizzy, as though he'd been long submerged under the ocean and had risen back to the surface too quickly. There was that disease you could get: the bends. He looked critically at the criss-cross of blue veins beneath his skin, imagining the poisonous bubbles of nitrogen hitching a ride to his heart, silvery and fatal. There was a rushing sound in his ears and his vision felt foggy. He waited, jaw tightened impatiently, for them to clear; for the world to decide that it wanted him back.  
Slowly, he leant back in his seat to study his bandmates as they worked around him. It was a slightly surreal thing to do. They had moved into another studio, bigger and decidedly more modern – everything in ultra straight lines and made of either clear, frosted or dark glass, all very thick, and wood very light and bright and fake-looking, and all the sofas real actual leather that squeaked under the body and stuck to bare skin. All the glass divided the space up into a hive-like mass of little soundproof booths, and that was why it was so odd to look at: it was very strange to watch somebody get very involved in playing an instrument but not be able to hear them. He watched each of them for a while, to see if any of them would feel his gaze and look up, but they didn't. Shinya was busy pressing an icepack to his wrist, an uncharacteristically sour look on his face; he had recently been told that when not performing, he should give himself a short break from playing every ninety minutes or so, and he was stuck in the position of wanting to religiously obey his doctor's orders whilst also being incredibly irritated by them. In a larger booth to his left Die was happily grooving, his eyes closed and his head bopping along to whatever rhythm he was making. He was dripping sweat, and his crimson hair was sticking to the back of his neck and the sides of his face in damp spikes; sharing the space with him was Toshiya, his fingers a blur over the strings of his bass, looking just as sweaty and grinning with a kind of exhausted exhilaration: whatever was happening in their booth, they were obviously happy with it. For a moment Kyo was tempted to reach out to the little intercom panel and press the button that would filter their sound into the sitting area, but he dismissed the idea quickly: Die and Toshiya shared the rare gift of being able to enjoy the _potential_ of the sounds they made, no matter how god-awful their happy cacophony actually was, and it was likely that they were only looking so celebratory because what they were playing was marginally less discordant than yesterday's efforts.  
Guitarists.  
  
Last of all there was Kaoru, sitting quite alone and separate from the others with his guitar in his lap and about a dozen sheets of paper littering the floor around him, a pair of headphones propped carelessly over his ears. He was working in the way Kyo liked to see him work: not tensely nit-picking, or furrowing his eyebrows so tightly he gave himself a headache, but wildly switching between tasks in order to get the ideas in his head down all the more quickly. At those times he made Kyo think of a hurricane: all whirling and rushing and turmoil on the surface whilst inside his head, the eye of the storm revolved serenely, almost gracefully – attentively tuned in, like he was picking up radio signals from far away – and perfect. It didn't happen all that often, but when it did it made him fiercely productive, turning out the rough drafts of perhaps five or six songs that would later be honed into the bulk of an album; into the singles that sold their way up the Oricon and made it so that Kyo never had to try to figure out what kind of day job would be the least offensive to him. Whatever Kaoru was working on now, with his eyes wide and alert and his guitar slung over him – he sat on the floor, his pen bleeding a blotchy ink-stain over the side of his palm – it would be wonderful. And Kaoru would listen to their congratulations and look pleased but awkward, and his cheeks would start to burn.  
'Hello, Kyo.'  
Die and Toshiya were laughing hard together in their booth, so hard that Die was sagging against the wall, his sweaty hair hanging in his eyes, and Toshiya's big hand was on his shoulder, either supporting him or being supported by him, it was hard to tell. Looking at them together, it felt weird how well-matched their bodies were: how tall and lean and lanky they were together. They made Kyo feel like a creature from another planet, like some sub-evolution, an inferior species.  
He shut his notebook with a soft snap.  
  
'Hello, Shinya,' Kyo said. The drummer was sat neatly beside him on the sofa, stretching out his wrists and fingers now, going through all his exercises with a contained sort of precision.  
'Did I interrupt a big thought?'  
'Nah. Not big. Wrists okay?'  
'They're fine, thank you.'  
Shinya eased himself comfortably back against the cushions, and for a moment they were both quiet as they watched Die and Toshiya together.  
'I'm glad they get along well,' Shinya commented lightly.  
Kyo gave a non-committal grunt.  
'I used to worry that he'd leave.'  
'Toshiya?'  
'Mm. If he didn't get closer to us.' He arranged his pants fussily over his knees. 'I don't think I appreciated how close-knit we were until he joined. I wish I had.'  
'Not your job to babysit him,' Kyo said carelessly, and Shinya's brow furrowed just for a moment.  
'Well,' he said at last, 'I'm just glad that he and Die get along like that.'  
'He doesn't need Die; he's got Kaoru.'  
Shinya looked doubtful.  
'Well, but – back in the beginning, though—'  
Kyo snorted rudely. 'He's _always_ had Kaoru.'  
Shinya looked even more dubious, but he ducked his head politely. 'Right,' he said a little awkwardly, 'Well, anyway...'  
Kyo eyed him drily. In a lot of ways, he thought, Shinya was exactly the same as he'd been back when they'd first met; he'd been fourteen and a half, then, painfully shy and stubborn with it, not a _dickhead_ with the stubbornness like Kaoru could be sometimes but just self-contained, immovable, and even though the shyness had partly graduated to a kind of calm self-assurance, the stubbornness hadn't changed. For such a weak-looking person, he was laughably determined, whether he was laying out his terms neatly to his fledgling band (_yes_, he was happy to devote his life to it, but he was also going to stick around in Osaka and finish high school, and _that_ was non-negotiable) or building up to whatever point he was now dancing around with Kyo.  
It made Kyo want to smile at him: he wondered if he'd ever be able to love any child of his own so purely. It didn't seem very likely.  
'Whatever point you're getting at,' he said now, his gaze on Die and Toshiya unwavering as he leant back on the sofa, 'Hurry up and make it.'  
There was a small silence – the pause whilst Shinya shuffled his thoughts into a neater shape – and then Shinya said, 'I feel bad about how we treated Toshiya the other day.'  
'You mean, you feel bad about how_ I_ treated him.'  
'No,' Shinya said, surprisingly firm, 'I was part of it too. I wanted to know what was going on, so I pushed it. But it wasn't nice and I think we alienated him and I regret it.'  
He said this last part all in a rush, and when Kyo dragged his eyes away from Die and Toshiya to look at him, he saw that his cheeks were slightly pink.  
'But the way you were did bother me,' Shinya added at last, sounding extremely uncomfortable. 'I don't mind if Toshiya has sex with men. That's his business.'  
'But,' Kyo prompted, barely polite.  
'But – you _do_ have a problem with it. Don't you.' His voice had grown less forceful but still he stared at Kyo solidly, his eyes luminous under the studio lighting.  
Kyo stifled a sigh, clenching his teeth together so his jaw clicked. He'd had a new lip piercing done and the inside of his mouth felt hot and tight and smooth, the texture of a hot water bottle. Irritation pushed at his throat like a yawn; irritation at Shinya's stupid concerned face, the way he was peering into Kyo's eyes as though examining him for something, the demure way he had his hands folded, like he was determined that his little intervention was going to be handled with the utmost civility.  
'Maybe that's _my_ business,' Kyo said flatly.  
'But Kyo—'  
'It's nothing to do with you.'  
'But _Kyo_—'  
'Shinya,' Kyo interrupted, his voice suddenly forceful through his gritted teeth, 'I'm sorry but you really don't understand anything, so just _leave_ it.'  
A raw kind of silence stretched between them. Kyo looked pale and tired but lucid; Shinya appeared thoughtful and a little miserable. Together, they watched as Toshiya and Die put their instruments down and stretched out their aching shoulders and backs; pushed back their sweaty hair and grinned at each other. Die wobbled off-balance and Toshiya steadied him, sniggering. If Shinya had been looking at Kyo instead of at them, he would have seen the singer tense slightly, but instead he just sighed and gave his right wrist an experimental flex.  
'You know,' he said in his quiet, steady voice, 'It's not exactly easy to stand up to you.'  
His eyes dashed across Kyo's face. They weren't angry looking, exactly, but they were oddly penetrating.  
'I'm not a kid,' he said simply. 'I don't want to be treated like one. I can tell when something's bothering you, and you don't have to tell me what it is but you do have to stop disregarding me. Being younger than you doesn't make me useless.'  
There was a tense pause.  
'I'm sorry,' Kyo said at last.  
'That's all right,' Shinya said with dignity.  
'You sound like your dad, you know.'  
'There are worse people to sound like.'  
'I know. I like your dad.'  
'You're changing the subject.'  
'Mmhm.' Kyo paused, and then sighed. 'There's nothing bothering me. I don't like conversations like this, so I'd rather we just leave it.'  
Shinya smiled ruefully, but he clearly recognised the dismissal; he got to his feet, giving both arms one last careful stretch.  
'All right, keep your secrets then. But...' he hesitated, 'I knew you before you were Kyo, remember. So you can stick with this whole thing if you want, but I just want you to know that I'm not buying it, and I'm not going to buy it.'  
'Noted,' Kyo said sulkily. He slouched down further in his seat, clearly not willing to say anything more; he pulled his knees up to his chest and glowered over the top of them. When he thought about it, Shinya was really the only person in the world who ever tried to change him; to improve him. He made it clear that they were friends either way, but he tried anyway.  
It was sort of flattering, when he really thought about it. He stuck a cigarette between his lips and went to go outside and smoke it.  
  
Darkness set in early in the winter; however, it had been truly dark for several hours by the time Kaoru stood up from his work. He looked very tired, but also charged, as if somebody had stuck him through with a thousand volts: he fought a cramp in his leg, a slight dizziness in his head; flexed his aching fingers and yawned good and long. His bones felt weary, but his mind was very much awake, and he tidied all his papers into a neat bundle before slipping his guitar back into its case – realising, with a wry self-consciousness, just how tenderly he touched it – and checking to see who was still around. Most of the little glass booths were dark, but a familiar figure was sprawled gracefully over the long, low sofa that Kyo had been huddled up on earlier. Kaoru's first guilty thought was that the younger man had some new fight to pick with him and so had lain in wait, but closer inspection told him the truth; Toshiya obviously was not awaiting company. He had his eyes closed and headphones clamped tight over his ears and his lips were moving faintly along with the music; not mouthing the words but just checking the rhythm, which was how Kaoru knew that it was some composition he was working on – if it had been a whole song, he probably would have been quietly singing along. The glasses that he always claimed made him look like a nerd were resting on the bridge of his nose, and as Kaoru watched he gave a wide, inelegant yawn, like an animal.  
It made Kaoru want to smile.  
'You aren't planning on sleeping here, are you?' he asked. He tried to make his voice gentle but Toshiya jumped all the same, and he gave an embarrassed little laugh as he wrenched his headphones off.  
'I guess not. Sorry, I just – I was just...'  
'In the zone,' Kaoru finished for him, and Toshiya gave him a slightly sheepish smile. There was a plastic cup on the table next to him and Toshiya groped for it, taking a steadying sip. A bottle of whisky stood beside it, perhaps a little more than two thirds full, and for lack of anything better to say or do, Kaoru picked it up to examine the label.  
'That's a surprise,' he said at last. 'Pretty sure you can afford better than this, Mr Rockstar.'  
Toshiya's smile turned a little mischievous and he raised his plastic cup to Kaoru, as if he was toasting him.  
'Old habits die hard,' he said. 'Plus, it's not bad. Want to join me?'  
'It's getting pretty late.'  
'Is it?' The bassist blinked at the wall clock sleepily, 'Oh, right.'  
'What are you still doing here, anyway?'  
Toshiya shrugged, his shoulders pressing awkwardly up against the arm of the sofa. 'Don't have much to get home for. I'm working on my one song for the album. After Macabre I figured I should make it a tradition.'  
'What about Gauze? _Raison D'etre_, that was you, wasn't it?'  
Toshiya shot him a boyish grin.  
'Oh no, Kaoru failed the number one fan test; Shinya and I wrote that together.'  
'That counts,' Kaoru scoffed, and Toshiya's grin widened.  
'Are you upset that you got it wrong?' he teased.  
  
The silence between them then was a funny one: not uncomfortable exactly, but not all that easy either. Kaoru shifted awkwardly where he stood for a moment before giving in and sitting down next to the bassist, taking a plastic cup from the packet on the table and pouring himself a measure of whisky. Without discussing it, he and Toshiya raised their cups to each other and drained the contents in a single fiery gulp that made Kaoru's eyes want to water.  
'It was _Egnirys_ on Macabre, wasn't it?' he asked inanely, as if he didn't already know.  
'Yeah.'  
'Yeah.' He studied his own fingers briefly. 'I like that song.'  
Toshiya gave an ungainly snort. 'I don't remember you saying that at the time.'  
'No?'  
'Are you serious? You got mad at me because of the lyrics, remember?'  
Kaoru frowned. 'But Kyo writes the—'  
'I _know_,' Toshiya laughed, tipping his head back, 'That's what I said! Don't you remember?'  
Kaoru's frown deepened, but all of a sudden, he did remember: his own voice seemed to echo back at him inside his head – _oh, what, you're trying to tell me that you wrote in a rap section on a fucking whim?...like it's not bad enough that our bassist looks like a reject Beatle; now apparently we jerk off on walls and freebase coke and wear chastity belts, too._  
And Toshiya's retort, his voice dripping with sarcasm and so outraged and furious he'd been almost spitting the words out: _it's not even possible to jerk off in a chastity belt; that's the whole point_.  
Kaoru smiled now, if he hadn't smiled then. Toshiya refilled both of their cups and just like before, without saying a word, they raised them to each other and drank. It was an eerie sort of feeling, as though they were toasting to their memories, or to the way they used to be, or something. But why should it feel strange? Old friends drank to each other all the time, didn't they? Reminisced, rolled their eyes at each other, sat closer together on the couch?  
'I guess you were maybe right about that one.'  
'Am I hearing this correctly? You're actually telling me that I was in the right?'  
Kaoru yawned widely. 'Yeah, but if you tell anyone else, I'll deny it.' He took his turn to refill their cups, but Toshiya didn't pick his up. He had fixed Kaoru with a rather more serious look than he'd been expecting, and it made him nervous.  
'Look,' Toshiya said a little awkwardly, 'Thanks for cutting in the other day, when we were driving back. It was nice of you.'  
Kaoru feigned a look of caricaturish bafflement, and Toshiya raised an eyebrow. 'Come on. I wasn't born yesterday,' he said drily, and Kaoru sighed, taking a sip of his drink.  
'I just wanted to avoid a fight,' he said, speaking half into his cup, 'That's all.'  
Toshiya snorted. 'Does it make me a coward if I say I'd rather argue with you than Kyo?'  
'No, that sounds like a sane choice.'  
They exchanged slightly uncomfortable smiles and drained their cups. The whisky was rough but in Kaoru's exhausted state it was making him feel pleasantly boneless and languid, as if he was floating in water. He always had such trouble falling asleep, but now he felt like he could just close his eyes and drift off.  
'D'you always drink alone?' he mumbled. 'I mean, you just had this on you, or what?'  
Toshiya shrugged loosely, and Kaoru gave him a decidedly sharper look. 'You had some with you at the hotel, too.'  
'Don't worry, I'm not driving.'  
'Driving? Oh. Home.' Kaoru yawned again, blinking slowly, 'Yeah, we should go home.'  
'Yeah, we should,' Toshiya agreed quietly, but neither of them moved. He tipped his head back over the arm of the sofa, studying the ceiling quietly. Next to the gentle rhythms of their breathing, the din of the city around them seemed incredibly loud, like a heartbeat that only makes itself known in the still of the night or in the deep silence underwater.  
After a long pause, Toshiya pushed himself half upright and clumsily refilled their cups. Together they drank the whisky down; Kaoru noted that this fourth measure tasted better than the first. Dimly, he wondered how much they had drunk. The level of liquid in the bottle had dropped dramatically; barely an inch of amber sloshed around inside as Toshiya set it down again. Immediately after they had emptied their cups, he split what was left between them. Again, they drank. There was a strange mood between them, a kind of mutual lucidity; it was as if they had made a pact of some sort that had sworn them both to see things through to the end. Kaoru's head was feeling pleasantly fuzzy, and his face was warm; he ran his hands through his hair and thought that when the strands fell back into place against his reddened cheeks they sizzled softly and stuck like little filaments. He wobbled slightly when he got up to go over to the mini fridge – it contained five or six bottles of water but he selected two cans of beer instead, idly wondering what he thought he was doing – but otherwise he didn't feel drunk, just pleasantly dazed, as if he had woken from a long sleep in the sunshine. He deposited one of the beers neatly on Toshiya's stomach and cracked open his own as he sat heavily back down, almost on top of the bassist's feet; the younger man made a soft noise of protest and moved them quickly out of the way, settling them instead on Kaoru's lap.  
'You're drunk,' he said, smug.  
'You are,' Kaoru argued half-heartedly. He didn't know what to do about Toshiya's feet in his lap. Eventually he settled for giving a light pat to one of his ankles and settling his hand around it loosely. He took a long, long slug of his beer as Toshiya opened his; the bassist watched in an attitude of restrained dismay as it fizzed over and dripped onto his shirt.  
'Maybe a little,' Toshiya agreed.  
'You're going to stink.'  
'I know. Sweat and beer – at least I'm going to stink like a man.'  
Kaoru made an amused _humph_ noise, but his hand on Toshiya's calf stole his attention away; he couldn't seem to stop looking at it.  
'D'you think Die and Kyo really found a gay bar?' he asked, as though it was a completely logical change of topic. 'It doesn't feel very likely, all the way out there.'  
'I dunno. It's possible.'  
'Is it?'  
'Well...I mean, it wouldn't be like in the city. Probably they just found a low-key kind of place that attracted a certain...clientele.'  
'Gay men, you mean?'  
Toshiya was quiet, brushing out his hair with his fingertips as he thought.  
'Men-oriented men, maybe,' he said at last. 'It takes a lot to really identify as gay when you're stuck out in some village. I learned that growing up. I mean – maybe you're gay, or bi or something, but...' he made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, 'It's not like you'd hang a sign on the door saying Gay Bar. You know? But there are always going to be places where men go to be with other men, no matter where you are. The motivation is up to them.'  
'I didn't know that.'  
Toshiya shot him a quick, amused glance. 'Why would you?'  
'But in the city – do you?'  
Toshiya smiled to himself. 'There's a bar I go to in Doyama sometimes.'  
'Oh.' Kaoru took a fortifying gulp of beer and swiped foam from his upper lip with the back of his hand. 'What's it...like?'  
'Um, let me think. Uh, there's music, and places to sit, and then there's this big long counter where you can buy a drink. It's a _bar_, Kaoru.' The smile he gave him was only mildly exasperated. 'I have a few friends there. They know what I do and I don't care. I trust them.'  
'So they know that you're...Toshiya from Dir en Grey, and everything?'  
Toshiya smiled against the lip of his beer.  
'If they remember the name of the band, yeah. We don't really talk about it much. Mostly they just tell me that nobody's going to love me with calluses all over my fingers.'  
His eyes performed a quick dart up to Kaoru's face, reading the doubt there, and his smile widened. 'You know you should thank them,' he added conversationally, 'If I hadn't made friends there I might have ended up leaving right back at the beginning. It was pretty lonely, you know.'  
Kaoru frowned.  
'But not _really_, though.'  
'Huh?'  
'I mean – you wouldn't have really _left_.'  
Toshiya didn't say anything, and Kaoru turned slightly to look at him. 'Would you,' he prompted, and Toshiya gave a helpless sort of shrug.  
  
Their talk petered out after that. They drank more beer and Kaoru leant his head back and closed his eyes; he listened as Toshiya's breathing gradually grew slower and more regular. Rain was pattering against the window; a soothing sound. When he shifted he felt weird, stiff and burdened, as though there was some great bruise inside of his chest that was radiating tenderness and pain throughout his body; as though he had something inside of him that had suddenly moved and was jabbing at him with its newly exposed edges; as though he carried something fragile, and brittle, and sharp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay: so I proofread this chapter, but I proofread it drunk. Either way, if you're enjoying this, say hi! I miss seeing humans in real life and this is the next best thing.


	17. Chapter 17

Kaoru awoke to a strange sound; a sort of sharp, metallic snapping sound. Snap, silence. Snap, silence. For a moment or so he gazed groggily up at the ceiling, wondering why everything was so brightly lit when he had always, always needed total darkness to sleep. His vision without glasses was misty – where were his glasses? His head felt pleasantly thick and fuzzy, and then a low, soft laugh seemed to vibrate through his whole body.  
'Yes,' a familiar voice was saying in a low murmur, 'Uh huh...I'm at the studio right now. No, I...' there was a pause, and then that same light, quiet laugh that seemed to flutter through Kaoru's bones, waking him up completely – he found his glasses snagged in the neck of his T-shirt by one arm – 'No, I guess I fell asleep here.'   
Kaoru pulled himself stiffly upright. He couldn't have been asleep for long – it was still the same level of darkness, at least, and it was still raining – but apparently his limbs had gone ahead and locked up for the night. He saw that the snapping noise was the sound of Toshiya playing with a lighter; he had his back to Kaoru and was gazing out of the window as he chatted on his cellphone, and every few minutes he spun the ignition, let the flame burst upwards, and then smartly clapped the lid down. Pause, strike, snap. Pause, strike, snap. Kaoru rubbed his eyes and propped his glasses back on his nose; it was _his_ lighter, he recognised the filigree glint of it.   
'Look, I just...not yet, okay? I just...' Toshiya fell silent. Pause, strike, snap. The sounds of his conversation were soft and cajoling, 'I know...I know. No, they'll love you. I'm sure.' Another soft laugh, '_Everyone_ loves you; that's the whole problem.'   
Kaoru got to his feet, aware that he was moving rather more clumsily than he would normally, intentionally making as much noise as possible. Toshiya jumped guiltily, spinning around to face him; he gave him a sheepish sort of smile and threw the lighter at him in a graceful arc across the room. Kaoru surprised himself by catching it one-handed. He felt quite pleased, actually.   
'Listen, I should go. Yeah, I'm going home, I promise. Okay. Okay. Good night.' He snapped closed his cellphone and gave Kaoru a slightly embarrassed look, 'Sorry about that. Did I wake you? I'm amazed you slept through it ringing.'   
Kaoru yawned widely. 'It's okay. I wasn't exactly planning on sleeping here all night.'   
'I guess not.' Toshiya hovered nervously. He half-turned back to the window and folded his arms in a strange, anxious sort of way, cupping his elbows in his palms tightly. 'Your lighter was just out on the table,' he added. 'Sorry. That was really wasteful of me, wasn't it?'  
'I'm sure my finances can stretch to a refill of lighter fluid. Consider it a gift.'   
'That was just a friend,' Toshiya said, carefully offhand, 'On the phone.'   
'Oh, right.' Kaoru rubbed his hands over his head, trying to clear it, 'Calls sort of late, doesn't he?'  
Toshiya shrugged, but otherwise was silent.   
'Sounds like more than a friend,' Kaoru suggested painfully, at long last. 'Are you seeing someone?'   
All at once the _Embryo_ shoot came back to him – Toshiya dropping down the step of that sound trailer, the kiss on his cheek and the hand on his ass – and his face reddened. 'Oh,' he muttered, 'Sorry. Of course not.'   
'I'm not,' Toshiya agreed firmly, his voice abrupt and perfectly matter-of-fact but just a shade too fast. 'I don't cheat. I've just been – talking to this guy, that's all.'  
'Exploring your options,' Kaoru said in a voice that was not his own, and Toshiya gave a grimace-like smile.  
'Right.'   
Kaoru leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He felt weird – sort of unsettled. He cleared his throat.   
'Right,' he echoed shortly, and Toshiya's smile slipped a little.   
'What?'  
'Nothing.'   
'No, really, what is it?'  
'_Nothing_, I said. I'm tired. I'm going to go home.'   
But he didn't move, and flatly Toshiya said, 'You're pissed off at me.'   
'Don't be stupid.'   
'I'm not being stupid; _you're_ being obtuse.'   
'Look, just – don't _start_, okay?' Kaoru said wearily, as if he was dealing with a very young but petulant child. He felt tipsy from the combination of drinks but otherwise very awake and alert, and he was aware that his cheeks were hot and that the night air would feel very good and cool. 'Nothing's wrong,' he said shortly, feeling like his tongue wasn't moving quite right in his mouth, 'I just want to go home and go to sleep.' He checked his watch and gave a soft curse: it was coming up to two in the morning. 'The buses will have stopped. We'll have to take cabs.'   
'There's a taxi rank around the corner,' Toshiya said carelessly, 'Knock yourself out.'   
'Oh what, you're just going to walk home? For an hour? In the rain? At 2 a.m.?'   
'Well deduced,' Toshiya said sourly.  
'You don't even have a coat, Toshiya.'   
'Yeah, well, I don't have any cash either. So.' He tucked some hair behind his ear, scrutinising what he could see of the outdoors through the dark windows, 'It's not even raining that hard.'   
Kaoru gave a loud, frustrated groan.   
'Great. That's just perfect.'   
'What?'  
'How much do you _actually_ have on you? I mean in coins and stuff.'  
'I don't have any cash,' Toshiya repeated, his voice pointedly loud and clear, as though Kaoru was deaf or very stupid. 'I have...' he fished awkwardly in his pocket for his wallet and flipped it open, 'A driver's license, a debit card, two credit cards, and a condom.'  
'You don't have _any_ _change_.'   
'How many times do you need to _hear_ this, Kaoru?'   
'Who carries _no_ change!? That's _bananas_!'  
Despite himself, Toshiya gave a snort of laughter. 'Bananas?' he repeated, amused.  
'Well, I don't have enough cash to get us both home. Or I mean I do, but...'   
Frustrated, he dug around for his own wallet and pulled out a slim clutch of notes, 'Look.'   
'Moneybags,' Toshiya said sarcastically, and Kaoru rolled his eyes.   
'I only have ten thousands.'   
'Who only carries ten thousands on them?'  
'I went to the ATM this morning; this is what it gave me. I have these, and I have...' he scratched around in his pocket briefly and came up with a scanty collection of coins, 'Five hundred and fifty, sixty...sixty-seven yen. That won't be enough.'   
'So just use the notes; they're still _money_.'   
'I can't ask a cab driver to break a ten thousand yen note.'  
'That's a bullshit rule.'   
'It's a...human _decency_ rule! _Fuck_. You _really_ don't have anything?'  
'I am not saying it again,' Toshiya said dangerously, and Kaoru sighed, rubbing an agitated hand against the back of his neck.   
'Fuck,' he said again, resignedly. 'Come on, then.'   
'Come on where?'  
'Come on, I'm walking you home. So let's go.'   
'Kaoru.' Toshiya's eyes were boring right into his, very dark and clear, 'I am a grown-up. I don't need an escort home.'   
'Your neighbourhood is rough as fuck. I'm not letting you get mugged.'  
'Oh yeah, I don't want anyone taking all this cash I'm carrying,' Toshiya muttered acidly.  
'Can we just skip ahead through your whole sarcastic bit, and get going? I'm tired.'   
'So go! What, are you _worried_ about me?'  
'In the _very limited_ sense that it would be a complete ball ache to find another bassist, yes. So come on.'   
  
It might not have been raining that hard, Kaoru thought, but it certainly was fucking cold. The rainwater got inside his collar and soaked his hair, dripped down inside his shirt and misted his glasses up. He tried to think of the last time he'd actually walked in the rain without an umbrella or at least a hood, and found he couldn't remember. It was sort of a shock, somehow, to be experiencing the weather so fully. He'd forgotten how annoying it was to have water constantly running down his face and splashing into his shoes.   
At first he and Toshiya sniped at each other, but little by little, they seemed to fall into a better sort of pattern. They talked about music, about what Toshiya was working on and what Kaoru was working on; that conversation carried them almost all the way across Tennoji. It was gone half past two by the time they reached the Tsutenkaku Tower, its lights bleary-looking in the rain; Kaoru was aware of holding himself a little awkwardly, sort of self-consciously, as they passed it and turned south; that was where their journeys would normally diverge, and though Toshiya slid Kaoru a sidelong look, he didn't say anything.   
'You've lived in the same place a while now,' Kaoru said stupidly, a fresh handful of rain catching him in the face – _fuck_, it was cold – and received a careless sort of shrug in return.   
'Yeah, I guess.'   
'You ever think of moving?'   
'Sometimes. I guess it feels like...I don't know, when am I ever there? We go on tour, and then if we're not on tour then I pretty much spend all my time in the studio.'   
'Yeah, but you get days off, Toshiya.'  
'I don't really spend those at home, though,' Toshiya said, hunching his shoulders against the rain, 'I kind of hate it, just sitting around all day by myself.'   
'Huh. You ever feel like maybe that'd be better if you lived somewhere you actually liked?'  
He thought he might have gone too far with the condescension, but Toshiya gave him a tucked little smile.   
'Yeah, but. You know.' With his hands in his pockets he sort of stretched his arms, locking his elbows and digging his hands in deeper: an oddly teenage gesture. 'My big dream is arriving somewhere and having it feel like home. That's what I want.'   
'You think that really happens?'  
'I don't know. Why not?'   
'I mean, maybe you have to work at making somewhere your home. Find your niche, you know.'   
'Yeah, but what if there isn't a niche for me?'   
'Then you carve one out, stupid.' Kaoru shrugged. 'That's why I like cities.'  
'That's why I _hate_ cities. Everyone else belongs and I feel like I'm just—'  
'Everyone else belongs?' Kaoru interrupted him, laughing, 'Toshiya, that's nuts. C'mon. _Everyone_ thinks everyone else belongs more. That's just part of it.'   
Toshiya looked suspicious, but his eyes when he glanced over at Kaoru were quite soft. 'Yeah?'  
'Yeah. Toshiya, we...you've lived here for three years now. You have a...you know where to get your hair cut here, and you have a dentist and an optician and a GP and a pharmacy, and a gym membership, and a local 7-Eleven, and I _know_ they must know you in there because you buy too much of their weird, own-brand whisky. You said yourself that you have a bar you go to, you have friends there.' Kaoru smiled at him, _half_-smiled because he felt suddenly weird, sort of exposed, and stuck out a hand and shoved Toshiya lightly in the shoulder because he felt so uncomfortable under his very fixed, very still gaze, 'You _belong_, Toshiya. As much as me or Kyo or Shinya or Die or anyone does. You belong.'   
  
It was gone three when they arrived at Toshiya's apartment building. He lived down a very narrow, cluttered-looking street and his apartment building only had four storeys, each one with a jutting balcony. All the lights in the windows were off, like he was the only person who lived there.   
'You want to come in?'   
'I should really get home.'   
Toshiya rolled his eyes tiredly. 'Yeah, like you just walked all the way here and now you're gonna go back on yourself and walk forty minutes to your place? Don't be an idiot, Kaoru.'   
'I'm _not_ being an—'  
'Just get inside, will you? I have some spare bedding; it's not a big deal.'   
'What, like – spend the night?'  
Toshiya widened his eyes at him exasperatedly. 'Sorry, do you have other plans?'  
'No, I just...' Kaoru frowned at him, 'Wouldn't it be weird?'  
The exasperated look faded from Toshiya's face, but the expression that replaced it wasn't one that Kaoru could interpret.  
'Why would it be weird?' Toshiya said levelly.   
Kaoru had never been inside Toshiya's apartment before. He lived on the first floor, up a draughty little stairwell, and the paint on his front door was peeling but inside, everything was very neat and clean-looking. He didn't have much furniture – the place seemed pretty small – but what he did have was surprisingly simple and relaxed-looking: a low table, a bookshelf, a TV but no sofa, about a hundred plants. They grew all over the place: grassy type things growing straight up, downy ferns, plants that overspilled their pots with masses of spidery tendrils. The overall impression was of a greenhouse in which somebody had shoved a few pieces of furniture, accessorised somewhat incongruously with a bass guitar lounging in the corner. It was the only object in the flat that gave any indication as to the identity of the occupant.  
'This is it,' Toshiya said unnecessarily, removing his shoes in the little genkan and proceeding in his socks, 'Come on it.'  
'It's nice,' Kaoru said. He heard the surprise in his own voice and hastily sought to cover it, 'I like it, I mean.'  
Toshiya looked a little suspicious. 'Thanks,' he said warily. 'Do you...want a drink, or anything?'  
'Oh. No, thank you.'   
Kaoru couldn't say why they were suddenly being so stiff with each other. To mask it he leant closer to examine a framed picture on the wall – the only wall decoration in the entire place, actually – and with a jolt he came across his own face looking back at him, Shinya at his elbow and Kyo on his other side, sitting on the roof of a pretend train in a children's playground; Die beneath them, cramped into the tiny space and grinning out of the train's window and Toshiya behind Kyo, sitting further back so as not to appear too much taller than him.  
Kaoru remembered that day. It was one of the first photographs they had ever had taken all together and they all looked so _young_, so fresh-faced, all with long hair that was hanging free from sprays and gels and waxes. It had been warm – one of the first really warm days of the year, in the middle of spring, just a few months after they'd all come together, and the more he stared the more he felt like he could smell that day, the promise of it, the smell of sun-warmed metal and the gritty, sandy ground, the fresh wash of the sky and his friends crowded around him: their clothes, soap and laundry detergent, cigarette smoke, the way Shinya always smelled a very tiny bit like dog fur. He remembered how Kyo had grumbled as he'd settled himself, squinting into the sun, nearly smiling. In the photograph Toshiya was pointing straight at the camera. He was laughing.   
'We look young,' Toshiya said, 'Don't we?'  
'Yeah, we really do. Look at Shinya; he's a..._foetus_.'   
Toshiya snorted, and Kaoru found himself smiling at him. 'It's a weird picture,' he added. He'd expected to have to explain his reasoning behind that statement, but Toshiya just nodded.   
'It's nice you kept it.'   
Toshiya was silent for a moment and then said, 'We all look happy. That's why I kept it.'   
But there was something just slightly odd, Kaoru thought, about the way he said it; something very _serious_ about the way he said it, his eyes locked onto their blurry black and white faces and his mouth not smiling. Like he only meant exactly what he said: that they looked happy. Not that they had _been_ happy. It sort of shrank Kaoru's tongue in his mouth, dried out his throat. He wanted to do something, like touch Toshiya on the arm or something, but he couldn't figure out if that sort of gesture would be too small or too big. It was confusing. He didn't want to look at him.  
'It's really nice you kept it,' he said again, finally.  
  
Since Toshiya had neither a sofa nor a regular bed, Kaoru was pretty confused about where he was supposed to sleep: the bedroom was almost totally empty apart from another bass – this one surrounded by a whole sheaf of notes, which Toshiya hurried to tidy, his face reddening – and a large closet.  
'Where's your bed?' he asked a little stupidly, and Toshiya gave a derisive snort.   
'I'm sorry, are you not from here?' he asked, faux polite, and opened the closet to reveal stacked bedding: futons, sheets, pillows. Kaoru raised his eyebrows, but didn't say anything. They made the beds up side by side, in silence, leaving a good two feet of distance between them; it was the most Toshiya's small bedroom would allow.  
Toshiya gave him a spare toothbrush, and a towel to dry off the worst of the rain. They took turns in the bathroom and stood staunchly back-to-back as they got undressed. Toshiya's place was chilly, but the rain pattering against the window was a soothing sound and the blankets were good and heavy; Kaoru pulled them up to his chin. The very last thing he did was take off his glasses. He always felt strangely vulnerable taking them off around other people, or in strange places; like he was making himself weaker, depriving himself of one of his most vital senses. It took, every time, a moment of adjustment. He hated the ways that the sharp lines of the world became so fuzzy and unreliable.   
'G'night.'   
'Yeah. Night, Toshiya.'   
They lapsed into silence. If he concentrated Kaoru thought he could just about hear Toshiya's soft breaths above the sound of the rain, although it might have been his imagination.   
He wondered about the man Toshiya had been speaking to on the phone; if he'd ever slept on this spare futon. He wondered if he'd be jealous to know that Kaoru was here. He didn't want to risk looking over at Toshiya, just in case the other man was looking back at him, but it was a weird thought to know that somebody – a _man_ – was out there in the world right now, wanting to sleep with his bassist. Somebody who already had a direct line to him, who knew his job and his cell phone number and could call him in the early hours of the morning without it being a socially insane thing to do, because they were – he supposed – _close_.   
He realised that he'd allowed himself to get used to the idea that only he knew Toshiya this well.   
Pretty fucking stupid of him.   
But it made him feel blindsided, somehow. As though he was running a race and his opponent had found some kind of shortcut, and now he had no hope at all of ever catching up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone who is reading and commenting! I hope it's not hardhearted to say that this lockdown has a big silver lining. I feel like I'm on a second honeymoon.


	18. Chapter 18

By the next morning, the rain had become sleet. Toshiya warmed his hands on his coffee cup and watched it spatter against the windows, the ice making crystalline starbursts on the glass before gathering too much weight, sliding down and out of sight in wet-looking clumps. From his window the entire city looked grey, from the streets to the buildings to the sky.   
He had the radio playing, but quietly: Kaoru was still asleep in his bedroom and he didn't want to disturb him. He was aware that his friend and band leader would have to wake up at some point, of course, and that when he did Toshiya would have to look at him and talk to him and offer him coffee, but he wasn't exactly in any hurry for that to happen.  
He felt embarrassed. Not just because he'd let Kaoru walk him home, as though he was some sort of damsel in distress, but also because he'd let the late night and the drink make him so stupidly _honest_, running his mouth about all of his problems as if it was anybody else's job to give a shit; he felt embarrassed for how fucking _earnest_ Kaoru had been, telling him that he belonged here; for the concerned way Kaoru had looked at him. He thought if Kaoru was still giving him that concerned look today, he was going to scream. He gripped his cup tighter. His phone kept vibrating on the counter top but he didn't want to look at it yet; it felt too early.   
Although it was, in fact, gone nine o'clock, and normally he would have left for the studio by now.   
'Morning.'  
Oh. Kaoru's voice sounded rough, and it was – annoyingly – pretty sexy.   
'Hi,' Toshiya said, not turning around. 'Coffee?'   
'Oh, yeah. That'd be good. Thanks.'   
Toshiya poured him a cup and handed it to him silently. He found Kaoru nicely dishevelled-looking, rumpled from sleep, with a pillow crease running down the left side of his face that Toshiya hated himself for finding so adorable. Who would have known that Kaoru first thing in the morning would look so _cute_, with his violet hair at all angles and the sleeves of his stupid, over-large T-shirt flapping around his arms, and then that deep, gravelly voice coming out of his mouth? It almost made Toshiya forget how fucking annoying he could be.   
Almost.   
'We'll have to go pretty soon,' Toshiya said, and witnessed the brief flash of alarm on Kaoru's face as he looked hastily around for a clock. 'It's just gone nine,' Toshiya added, amused, 'But I would love to see you do _this_—' he flailed around in an exaggerated impression, 'again.'   
Kaoru scowled and took a sip of his coffee. 'Trust you to make us late.'   
'Sorry, was_ I_ the one snoring away? I don't think so.'  
'You could've woken me, Toshiya.'   
'I didn't want to. You looked...' _so peaceful_, his mind said, but he caught himself, 'Like shit. I figured you could use some more rest.'   
'Thanks, mother.' Kaoru took a big swig from his cup even though it was too hot, and quickly ran his hands through his hair. 'All right. I'll brush my teeth, and then we should leave.'  
'Sure.'  
'Can you...' Kaoru hesitated, 'Could I borrow a sweater or something? I left mine on the floor last night and it's still all damp from the rain.'   
'Yeah, whatever. I'll find you something.'   
'Thanks.'   
He took one last gulp of his coffee and gave Toshiya an awkward sort of smile before putting his mug down and heading into the bathroom.   
  
In a sense what happened at the studio felt like it might have been overdue for a while, the way that scientists can predict the eruptions of volcanoes through faint tremors running through the earth. It was shocking only in that it had actually _happened_, finally; that the top had finally blown. What was left, the surprising part, was the aftershocks. The destruction that a single event could cause.   
They arrived at the studio just after ten, later than usual. The sweater Toshiya had loaned to Kaoru kept falling over his hands and so he kept pushing the sleeves up, a gesture that made him appear nervous. When they walked in together they found their three bandmates sitting around on the sofa, and Toshiya had the brief thought that it was good they hadn't started properly working yet, he and Kaoru wouldn't have missed much, before Kyo turned his dark eyes on them and they both stopped in their tracks. His face was cold in a way Toshiya had never yet seen it and the effect wasn't just intimidating but was actually almost _eerie_, as though he had turned his flesh and blood self into something hacked from stone, a grim force at its centre.   
He felt instantly incredibly guilty. Hot blood washed through his face and he was dimly aware of Kaoru clearing his throat to break the silence as he stepped forward, in front of Toshiya, into the full force of that glare. As if he could protect him.  
'What's going on?' Kaoru asked calmly, and Kyo's eyes flashed.   
'Why don't you tell me?' he said in a tight sort of voice. 'Coming in late. Coming in together. You're wearing his _clothes_, for god's sake.'   
The honest confusion on Kaoru's face made Toshiya want to shake him. He looked down at the borrowed sweater he was wearing as if there was something inherently evil about it that he hadn't grasped.   
'I don't—'  
'Are you _that_ hard up, Kaoru? Couldn't get any girls to blow you, really?'   
'What the _fuck_,' Kaoru said, his tone a sort of horrified bemusement, 'Kyo—'  
'And _you_,' Kyo said icily, turning his attention to Toshiya, 'You think I can't see through you. You think I haven't been _waiting_ for something like this to happen. You know when Yoshiki started working with us I figured you must've spent some time biting the pillow, taken one for the _team_ or whatever, but that's not what it was at all. You're just – you're just a filthy, fucking, _faggot_.'   
There was an awful, splintered quiet, as though something had shattered between the five of them. There was a rushing in Toshiya's ears, like being underwater, and then there just – wasn't. He felt himself go sort of distant, sort of faint, as though he was travelling out of range of some radio signal that was keeping him connected. He felt as though he wasn't exactly in his body any more; the feeling began at his fingertips, at the brush of his hair against his neck; he began to go vacant, to go formless, to inhabit the air and the silence. He was dimly aware that Shinya and Die were both gaping at him, and that Die looked flushed and Shinya very fraught, but he was drifting away from them. It was almost painless.  
'What the _hell_ are you implying?' he heard Kaoru growl, and the feeling went away. His feet were back on the ground again, and shame had locked his joints up and made his spine go rigid and his jaw clenched.  
'You know full fucking well what I'm implying,' Kyo snarled back.   
'_Fuck_ you for saying that,' Kaoru snapped, 'Fuck you for even _thinking_ that I would – that I'd _ever_—'  
'Did you think you were being _discreet_?' Kyo hissed. 'You're _always together_. Following each other around and having little sleepovers and staying later than anybody else; I've never seen two _friends_ so fucking _fascinated_ with each other—'  
'Enough,' Kaoru said, his voice so hard that it sounded like something cracking. His face looked white but very, very stern; his body was all wiry, tense strength, all angles, sharpened and squared off like some rancorous animal. 'You need to take that back. Right now.'   
'I won't,' Kyo said, but he looked slightly wary.  
'How fucking dare you,' Kaoru said sharply. 'After all these years, _that's_ how little you think of me?'  
'Kaoru,' Shinya said, his voice unusually high-pitched, but the guitarist didn't seem to hear him.   
'You are sick,' he said plainly, his sharp canine teeth showing, 'Sick in your fucking mind.'  
'I think you're lying,' Kyo said declaratively.  
'And I think you spend so much time making up sad, horrible, _twisted_ stories inside your head that you can't tell the difference between fact and fiction any more!'   
Die made an alarmed little noise, but Kaoru and Kyo simply glared at each other.   
'If you're not that way,' Kyo said finally, savagely, 'Then why are you always hanging around him?'  
'Well, Kyo,' Kaoru said sarcastically, 'We do kind of _work_ together. And—' his voice lost its acidic tone and he cast a worried sort of glance behind him, at Toshiya's very still face, 'We're friends.'  
'You can't be friends with somebody like that,' Kyo said disgustedly.   
'Sorry,' Toshiya blurted, 'But what the hell is _that_ supposed to mean?'   
'I mean that it's fucking _embarrassing_, watching you moon over him. It's embarrassing, and it's fucking _gross_. You know that it makes me feel _sick_ thinking about the fact that I used to share bedrooms with you, and do fanservice with you? We all did; we all _trusted_ you, and the whole time, you were a fag.'  
'Kyo,' Die said weakly, 'C'mon – that's not – he's not some kind of—'  
'It was our band,' Kyo said vigorously, '_Our_ band, before he came along. And he didn't even _tell_ us he was like that. You don't think that would have fucking _changed_ things?'  
Looking very stiff in the face, Kaoru shook his head.   
'That's enough, Kyo,' he said, looking rattled despite how calm he was keeping his voice, 'Toshiya had no obligation to divulge that kind of information. It's personal.'   
'It's not though, is it? It's professional. Because if this gets out, then we're all ruined.'   
From the looks on Die and Shinya's faces, this possibility hadn't yet occurred to them: their expressions of intense second-hand embarrassment had given way to a tense, unhappy sort of thoughtfulness. And Kyo looked flushed, Toshiya thought; flushed, like he was a little bit ashamed, but his neck was straight and his chin was jutting defiantly in the air.  
'I'm discreet,' Toshiya said quietly, hating how shaken-up his voice sounded; how _little_ it sounded, in that suddenly brittle and hostile room, 'I promise.'   
Kyo snorted and said, 'I saw you, you know. During the shoot for _Embryo_. I don't call getting a blowjob in the sound trailer discreet. Do you?'  
  
It was strange, but if Kyo had been looking at Kaoru as well as Toshiya, he might have felt that all his suspicions had been confirmed: humiliation had smeared a hot rag over Toshiya's cheeks and Kaoru looked pale but similarly guilty, as though it had been him in that sound trailer, rather than whoever Toshiya had been with – some assistant's assistant. He seemed to not know what to do with his hands: he kept pushing the sleeves of Toshiya's sweater up and they kept falling back down. The colour on Toshiya's face looked high and artificial, and below the slapped look of his cheeks the rest of his face was going the yellow-white hue of cottage cheese. He looked as though he was about to throw up.  
'How do you know about that?' Toshiya asked shakily. By a great force of will he made himself meet Kyo's eyes; let the rest of his bandmates blur featurelessly into the background. His hands shook and he knotted his fingers together tightly.   
'I told you. I saw.'   
'No,' Toshiya said, and swallowed. 'No,' he repeated, stronger, 'You didn't see. You weren't anywhere around; I remember. When we went – when I went into the trailer, you were off smoking, and when we were fin— when I came out, you were way over by the crane, watching the car. How could you have seen?'  
'Toshiya,' the vocalist began dryly, but Toshiya interrupted him with a trembling, accusatory finger.   
'You,' he said disgustedly, 'You were eavesdropping! You must have – you followed Kaoru and I upstairs and you listened outside my _door_!'  
Kyo blinked at him, unabashed. 'Well, so what? I followed you because I wanted to know what _faggot_ thing you were up to together—'  
'I would_ never_,' Kaoru hissed viciously, and even though he was speaking quietly, his voice was forceful enough to make everybody in the room be still. 'I would _never_ do anything like that.'  
He was shaking, but not with fear. His hands were clenched into tight, white-knuckled fists and he stepped forward aggressively, his eyes boring into Kyo's. 'I want to get this absolutely fucking clear,' he said, 'I don't like being accused of shit like that, because I think it's fucking gross as well. So what you're saying, all these little _insinuations_ you're making: they stop. _Now_.'  
He stopped there. He waited for Kyo's retort, and when the vocalist simply sat quietly, his gaze having ultimately dropped down to the floor, Kaoru finally unclenched his fists and shook them out. He gathered up the hair lying over the back of his neck in a handful, scrunching it up agitatedly at the base of his skull, like it was too hot. His other hand lay limp and useless at his side, fingers twitching slightly as the tension left his body. The entire room seemed shocked into silence; Shinya sat compulsively straightening his sweater cuffs, and Die looked entirely miserable. Toshiya had directed his gaze towards the window, which showed a single patch of white sky. The sleet had stopped. Everything outside looked still again.  
At long last Kaoru cleared his throat.   
'What happened at the shoot was unacceptable,' he said, his voice firm but calm again, 'But we've spoken about it, and it's behind us. It won't happen again.'   
He looked at Toshiya pointedly, but the bassist didn't meet his gaze. Distractedly, Toshiya just shook his head, and Kaoru took a deep breath as he turned back to Kyo. 'That's settled, then,' he said resolutely, 'And you owe him an apology, right now.'   
'Fuck off,' Kyo said at once. 'He put all of us in jeopardy, and he's still putting us in jeopardy. He should have told us.'   
Kaoru took another deep breath, and let it out as a long sigh.   
'All right,' he said at last, 'Everybody in here; everybody who has a professional problem with Toshiya being – with Toshiya's sexuality, raise your hand. A _professional_ problem. Not a personal one.'   
There was a beat of silence, and Kyo stuck his hand in the air. His dark eyes flickered from Toshiya to Kaoru, from Die to Shinya, scrutinising them all equally. His lips pressed tightly together, Shinya gave his head a resolute shake. Die just gave Kyo a hapless sort of shrug.   
'You're being out of line,' he said simply.  
Shinya swallowed. 'He's right,' he added. 'Maybe Toshiya being gay is a risk, but we all take risks. We've taken illegal drugs, we've pushed back against our label for controversial songs. You're our _singer_ but you still smoke thirty billion cigarettes a day. We all put the band at risk. And that's – that's part of it, I think. If it wasn't a gamble, we wouldn't want it so much. And I don't have a problem with Toshiya professionally or personally, and I'm really, _really_ disappointed that you do.'   
He stopped. It was quite a lot for him to have said at once and he looked winded, like he was out of practice.   
'Me neither,' Die pitched in quietly, 'Not professionally or personally.' He gave Toshiya a gentle punch on the shoulder, a stained smile on his face, 'If I had to compete with you for girls, I'd cry myself to sleep every night.'   
Despite how horribly embarrassed and miserable he looked, Toshiya's lips twitched a little at that, and he laid his hand on top of Die's for a moment.  
'Thanks,' he mumbled. A little unsteady, he gave a fake-looking stretch. He cast his eyes once around the room before settling his gaze on a nondescript point between Kyo and Kaoru, focussing over their shoulders and onto the blank wall behind them. 'Is that it, then?' he said, in a tone of voice that tried and failed to be casual. 'Because I think I want to work on some songs at home now, if that's okay.'   
Nobody said anything, and looking pinched and strangely distressed, Kaoru nodded.   
'Sure. Of course. I'll—' he hesitated, 'Do you want me to see you home, or—'  
Toshiya gave him a weird look; not really at him, but through him. 'No,' he said tonelessly, 'I know where I'm going.'   
'Right.' Kaoru gave an awkward sort of nod. 'Okay, then.' He raked his hands through his hair, rubbed at the back of his neck uncomfortably, 'Maybe – maybe everyone should just go, if they want. We've all been working hard so let's just...take today to calm down.'   
'Right,' Die agreed quickly, shooting a pointed look at Shinya, 'I'll drive you home.'   
'Oh, I can take the subway, it's not—'  
'No, I'll drive you,' Die said loudly.  
'Die, really—'  
He was cut off by the sound of the door closing; it was a heavy door, and it was noisy. Toshiya was gone, and Kaoru was staring at the spot where he'd been standing as though he had misplaced something small and valuable there. Kyo was winding a scarf around his neck, his expression hard to figure out except that he looked, Shinya thought, awfully tired and drawn.  
'Okay,' Shinya said, 'I'll take a ride. Thank you.'   
'You need a ride too, Kaoru?'  
He shook his head. 'No, I think I'm going to stay a little longer. Thanks.' He paused, feeling strange and uncertain, 'See you tomorrow, guys.'   
'All right. See you, Kaoru.'   
They left slowly, drifting through the door like ghosts: Kyo first, huddled deep down into his coat, and Shinya and Die with an uneasy sort of silence between them. When the door finally closed behind them all, it was a relief. Kaoru remained standing for a few more moments, in case any of them decided that they'd forgotten something and needed to come back, and then slowly walked over to the sofa and let himself sit stiffly down upon it, leaning right forward until his head was between his legs. He kept his hands clamped over the back of his neck, and closed his eyes. He heard his own breathing: the in, the out.


	19. Chapter 19

After the stormy atmosphere in the studio, it was a relief to step out into the cool, wet, soot-smelling air. Little droplets of moisture, too fine to really be rain, hung mistlike above the pavement and in haloes around the street lights, and by the time Shinya and Die reached the side street where Die had parked, their hair was damp and their clothes were beginning to droop. Neither of them said a word until they were strapped into their seats, the doors firmly closed behind them. In an uncharacteristically adult fashion, Die dropped his face into his hands and rubbed tensely at his forehead.   
'That,' he said a little indistinctly, 'Was fucking bananas.'   
'Which one worries you more,' Shinya asked grimly, 'Kyo or Kaoru?'  
A few raindrops pecked against the windscreen, and Die let his head fall back with a soft sigh. Stalling for time he rested his hands on the steering wheel as though he was about to drive away; adjusted his rear view mirror. A muscle worked steadily in his jaw, like he was chewing something over.  
'Do I have to choose now?' he said, his voice oddly flat. 'Both.'  
His mouth a straight line, Shinya nodded, and Die sighed again. 'Did you see Toshiya's _face_?' he asked, sounding pained, 'When Kaoru started in on all that _how dare you_ stuff?'  
'I saw it,' Shinya said quietly.   
'D'you...' Die bit at the inside of his cheek anxiously. As a sort of afterthought he stuck his keys into the ignition and started his engine, but his hand stalled reaching over to the gearstick and he simply locked his fingers around the wheel again, clinging to it so that his knuckles went white. 'Do you think he likes him?'  
Shinya was quiet for just a moment.   
'Yes,' he said after a moment.   
'But like...you know...like Kyo said? Romantically?'  
'Romantically?'  
Die coloured. 'Sexually,' he clarified, and the hint of a smile began at the corners of Shinya's lips.   
'Sexually?' he teased softly, and Die's blush intensified.   
'You know what I mean,' he said tensely, and Shinya nodded.  
'I do. I'm sorry.'   
'So do you think that Toshiya...?'  
'Yes. I do,' Shinya said declaratively.   
There was a short silence whilst Die tapped a cigarette out of his pack and lit it up; Shinya wrinkled his nose but didn't say anything.  
'You sound sure,' Die said finally. Shinya looked down at his fingers, flexing them in his lap.  
'Do you remember when we toured in Nagano? When Toshiya vanished and then—'  
'God, don't fucking remind me,' Die said wearily.   
'Well, I woke up early that morning, and I went to knock for them. For Kaoru, really. You know he gets insomnia; I thought if he was awake he might want to come and have breakfast with me.'  
Die was suddenly staring at him very intently. 'And?'  
'They weren't there. Not either of them. And at first I thought that maybe they were just sleeping deeply and couldn't hear me knocking, but when I went downstairs I looked outside into the car park, and the van was gone. So I asked and the receptionist said that they'd left together, around six.'  
'Holy shit,' Die muttered.  
'And when they got back they were weird. Different. They...it wasn't an argument. But I heard them talking. About Yoshiki, actually. Toshiya...he was apologising.'   
'So what, am I the last person to know about this whole Yoshiki thing?' Die said grumpily. Shinya gave a limp shrug.  
'I didn't know what it meant at the time.'   
Die gave him a pointed look, and Shinya nodded a little ruefully. 'But I could figure it out,' he allowed, his voice soft.  
'Fuck me,' Die said tiredly, shaking his head. 'This is so fucked _up_.'  
'Yep.'   
'So do you think – I mean, Kaoru can't like him _back_. Not after what he said. I mean – he said it was _gross_. Fuck, I can't imagine how Toshiya must be feeling.'   
'All sex is sort of gross, when you think about it,' Shinya said musingly, and Die snorted.  
'Are you serious?'  
'Of course. Why would you ever want first hand knowledge of somebody else's mucous membranes?'  
'Wow. You should write for _Playboy_.'   
Shinya gave his head a gentle shake. 'Sometimes I think I could go for the rest of my life without sex and be totally happy.' He paused, pressing his lips together briefly. 'I feel really upset, you know.'  
'Yeah.' Awkwardly, Die stared straight ahead through the windscreen. 'I know. I'm sorry.' He swallowed, ducked his head a little. 'I'll take you home.'   
Shinya didn't seem very able to look at Die, either. He kept his eyes fixed on his lap. 'Thank you.'   
  
Toshiya's walk home was cold and wet, but he hardly felt it. Anger kept him warm, visions of Kyo's face burning against his eyes like a brand so that they felt hot and dry and achy; humiliation lit him up from the inside, forcing the blood to rise in his cheeks and pound through the white insides of his wrists, gritting his teeth together, narrowing his vision into two pulsing points. Humid heat rose from the neck of his shirt. His hands squeezed themselves into fists. His phone rang and something boiled over in him when he saw Kaoru's name lit up on the display; with a strangled voice he yelled '_Fuck_ you!' and threw his phone as hard as he could against the side of the nearest building.  
He stood still, his breathing unsteady. People sharing the pavement with him avoided looking in his direction and passed him with a wide berth. When the frantic slam of blood in his ears had slowed a little, he took a deep breath and swallowed and went to pick up his phone: impressively, it had survived his assault with just a few new scuffs and scratches on the plastic casing. When it started to ring again, he squeezed it tight in his hand and waited for it to stop.  
Then, he flipped it open and, before he could second-guess his own choices, started to dial rapidly. He put it to his ear and almost bit his lower lip in two whilst it rang and rang, the meanest sound in the world.   
Then: 'Yes?'  
The sound seemed to drill into him, and he felt sick from his sudden headache.  
'Hi.' Was that normal, for his heart to start beating right up high in his throat like that? He swallowed hard. 'It's me.'   
A soft chuckle filtered down the line. 'I know it's you, moron. Cellphones give you that kind of information these days. The future is now.'   
'Are you at work?' Toshiya asked abruptly.  
'Of course I am; it's like eleven a.m.'  
'Right.' Toshiya thought he might have sold his soul for a cigarette at that moment; he started to pat at his pockets desperately but came up with nothing. 'When will you be done?'  
'Not until five. I can maybe sneak out earlier if I clear my desk, but—.'   
'Fuck that,' Toshiya interrupted, his voice shaking, 'I need to see you.'   
'Toshiya?' the voice on the other end had softened now, 'What's up? Is something wrong?' There was a pause. 'Fuck. You sound _super_ fucking weird.'   
'Sorry. I just – I have to see you. Tell them you're sick. I'll pay whatever you lose out on.'   
'Are you for real?'  
Toshiya paused, twisting the hem of his shirt so tightly around his fingers that they started to go purplish.  
'Yeah, I am. I'm sorry; I know I'm being nuts. It's just – I changed my mind about it, Kosuke. I want to see you. I want you to stay the night.'  
There was another pause. Feeling weak, Toshiya slumped back against the same building he'd thrown his phone against. 'Kosuke?' he prompted anxiously.  
'Yes! Sorry, I was just – just kind of shocked. Look – are you sure about this?'  
'Very sure,' Toshiya said with a steadiness he didn't feel.   
'Okay.'  
'“Okay”?'  
'Okay, I'll leave. I'll say I'm sick.'  
Toshiya's mouth was very dry, he noticed. _Fuck_, he wanted a cigarette.   
'Take a cab to mine,' he said, 'Yeah? I'll pay.'  
'Wow.' Kosuke sounded like he was smiling; that mischievous smile that Toshiya liked. 'You really want to see me that badly?'  
Toshiya gripped the phone grimly with both hands, but he forced a smile onto his face.  
'Yeah, I really do. It's – important.'   
'Okay, Toshiya. Okay. I'll be there.'  
'Thank you.'   
Surprising himself, he hung up before anything else could be said. He stared at the phone in his hand for a moment and then shoved it back in his pocket. He didn't want a cigarette any more.   
He felt not exactly lighter but _looser_, somehow, as if some great tight knot inside him had eased a little. He felt calm, almost, felt focussed; felt like himself but in crisis mode, the same mode he had talked himself into on the train into Nagano City for his fateful audition; the same mode he had found himself in when he'd looked Yoshiki, _the_ Yoshiki, in the eyes and asked him what exactly he thought he could do for them, and what he might want in return. Gaze steady. Heart high and uncomfortable, fast in his throat. Eyes wide open.  
He began to walk faster, hurrying through the hardening rain.  
  
Kosuke showed up about half an hour after Toshiya had arrived home. In those thirty minutes he'd had time to drag a towel through his hair, change his damp clothes for dry ones, yank the sheets off the futon where Kaoru had slept and throw them into the washing machine. He had the time to pour himself a quick one – for courage – and then _another_ quick one, and to brush his teeth.  
All that and he still had five minutes in which to pace around his apartment and bite at his fingernails, his stomach full of a fluttering sensation that really wasn't very nice or comfortable. When the knock on the door finally came it made him jump, and he had the vague feeling that he might actually throw up before taking a deep breath, forcing himself to get his shit together and go answer the door like a normal person.  
And then Kosuke had to go and look so fucking good. He was a compact sort of person, wiry, a little shorter than Toshiya himself – five six or seven, Toshiya would have guessed, but with a loose, rangy sort of posture that made him appear somehow taller. He stood on the doorstep dripping wet and grinning a little sheepishly, showing off the slightly uneven front teeth that Toshiya thought were cute, and there was a puddle of water gathering beneath his feet: as the day wore on into the afternoon the weather had grown worse, and the rain was tapping hard against Toshiya's windows with a sound like fingernails.   
'Couldn't get a cab,' he explained, smiling engagingly. 'The rain, you know.'   
He was holding a folded umbrella by the handle: when Toshiya eyed it pointedly, he just shrugged, his smile widening. 'It's broken.'   
'You're soaked.'  
'Yes I am, but look on the bright side.' His smile turned a little wicked and he took a step forward to back Toshiya into the apartment, closing the door casually behind them, 'Now you've got some wet clothes to get me out of.'   
Toshiya rolled his eyes, but he found that his lips were tugging upwards at the corners.   
'Anyone would think you were happy about it,' he said, and a pair of wet arms snaked around his waist.  
'Only a very _cynical_ person.'   
'Mmhm,' Toshiya said shrewdly. 'Open up that umbrella.'  
A little ruefully, Kosuke did so. It was the kind that had a button on the side to open it out automatically, and its canopy popped open with an almost smugly perfect _whump_ noise.   
'Look at that,' Kosuke said serenely, 'You fixed it.'   
'Uh huh. Very likely.'   
He grinned, and there were those cute teeth again: 'What can I say? I'm a sucker for a classic porn scenario. I'm not the bigshot rock star, here; I have to make my own starring role.'   
They were so close. Kosuke was getting him wet through his clothes where their bodies were touching; he could smell his smell of rainwater and cologne and cigarette smoke. His hips pressed just underneath Toshiya's own, like they were slotting together; his hand fanned over the small of Toshiya's back, just an inch or so above his ass.  
The air between them had a warm, damp, humid quality that made him think of exotic places he had never been: rainforests, jungles. Places where tropical steams rose in spirals and mists curled around verdant mountains.  
'Shit, you look nervous.'   
'I'm not nervous.'  
But he felt the hand on his lower back slacken a little, the pressure on his body ease.  
'Are you sure about this?'  
'I'm sure.'   
'So what changed your mind?'  
'Hm?' Toshiya said vaguely. He couldn't figure out why Kosuke wanted to talk about any of this shit _now_: now that they were in front of each other, it was much more fun to look at him and touch him. His hands settled gently around the other man's waist and then slid to his hips, feeling the top of his pants underneath his dripping shirt: it was weird to see him dressed for the workday. Normally he dressed kind of strangely, the way the art school students dressed, all in mismatched layers: corduroy pants like an old man would wear, rolled up to almost halfway up the shin, thick wool socks, combat boots, thrift store shirts that draped loosely over his shoulders. Jarring 1980s sweaters and English waxed cotton coats. Hand-knitted scarves. Toshiya had never known anybody who knew how to knit, but now he knew Kosuke.   
When he slid his hand underneath the plain grey work shirt, the skin was clammy with cold rain at first but then warmed against him.  
'_Well_,' Kosuke said delicately, his eyes fixed on Toshiya's face, 'A few days ago you told me _pretty_ unequivocally that you weren't interested in dating me unless it was exclusive.' He stroked some hair back behind Toshiya's ear, the touch wonderfully light and tender in a way that made Toshiya want to sigh, 'My stance on it hasn't changed. I want you, but I want the others as well.' He smiled, kissed Toshiya's bottom lip very quickly and softly. 'So if you're sure about this, then that's what I'm going to get.'   
'Okay,' Toshiya said simply.   
'Toshiya. You minded before. You're gonna have to tell me what changed.'   
'It just changed, that's all,' Toshiya said absently, and a cold pair of hands settled on top of his own. He found himself looking into a face that was still smiling, but with a hint of kind exasperation in the eyes; Kosuke leant himself back against the genkan wall, putting some distance between them, and raised an eyebrow expectantly.   
'That won't cut it, huh,' Toshiya said weakly, and ran a nervous hand through his hair. 'I don't know. Maybe I'm optimistic that you'll change.'   
'Unlikely,' Kosuke said easily, but he lifted Toshiya's hand to his lips and pressed a soft kiss to his knuckles to take the sting out of his words. 'But thank you for the faith.'   
'Just so long as you remember that a lot of people would be satisfied with just _one_ rock star boyfriend,' Toshiya said playfully.  
'I know, but...' Kosuke stretched, making his shirt ride up a welcome few inches; Toshiya's hands found their way there again, and he grinned, 'To be frank, I need a sugar daddy too, and I got the impression that wasn't exactly your style.'   
'I guess not.'   
'Plus, you're really not old enough to fulfil my kink for commanding, salt-and-pepper daddy types.'  
'No. And...' Toshiya wrinkled his nose, 'Gross.'   
'Don't worry, it's not my _only_ kink.'   
They were close again. Toshiya's fingers slid lightly up over the other man's slim, toned belly and felt it as he was pulled closer, Kosuke wrapping his arms around him. His smile had lost its mischievous edge; it was more knowing now, more serious.   
'So?' he prompted. He pressed Toshiya back against the wall, and felt the bassist's lips just barely brush his lips.   
'So let's get you out of those wet clothes,' he said softly.  
  
Kaoru felt like shit.   
It was sort of like being hungover; like he was hungover from the fight. His head was pounding sickly the way it did after a heavy night, and everything he'd said had left a foul taste in his mouth, and every time he thought about Toshiya's shocked, miserable, humiliated face his guts did this horrible twisting, squeezing, clenching thing that was actually sort of _worse_ than feeling sick the morning after a night out.  
And there was never anything fucking good on TV. And everything he did on his guitar sounded strained and try-hard and so, so fucking obvious. And Toshiya wasn't answering any of his calls.   
When he checked his watch he found it was only just coming up to three in the afternoon; the rain made it seem darker, later. He noticed that in the corner of his ceiling there was a long, unravelling ribbon of spider's web, flickering in a draught he couldn't feel, and that there was dust on top of his television set and god knows how many mugs left out on the coffee table and that _they_ were dusty, too; everything was dusty. The rain sounded like somebody tapping to be let in. It felt loud like bombs are loud.   
He wondered what Toshiya was doing, all alone in his apartment. Maybe also channel-hopping, or lying on his futon and listening to music. Jerking off. Composing. Drinking. Kaoru found himself getting to his feet and snapping the TV off.  
He thought they could probably compose and drink together just as well. They were good that way; just the two of them. He liked them to work like that. He remembered back when they had been recording _Gauze_ and they had worked a lot that way, back then; staying late together and not really talking much but just getting stuff done, feeling good and productive and feeding off of each other's energy. Sharing something without even having to discuss it. Before everything had got itself so completely fucked up.   
Like he was just stretching Kaoru got casually to his feet, but he shoved his wallet and phone into his pockets and found a beanie to jam over his head and a scarf to wind around his neck. He shrugged himself into a jacket with a hood and zipped it up to his neck, tucking the scarf in; he pushed his feet back into the shoes that he had toed off by the door earlier.   
He looked like he was going on a mountain expedition, not a few miles across town in bad weather. But as he grabbed his keys he thought that it was always good, with Toshiya, to be armoured.


	20. Chapter 20

Kosuke smoked Seven Stars cigarettes, and they tasted different to Toshiya's regular brand. He watched the smoke spiral up towards the ceiling, a greyer kind of blue. The sheets were bunched a little uncomfortably under his lower back, and there was cum cooling in Jackson Pollock splashes and drips over his belly. He'd put his copy of Psychocandy on the CD player and _Just Like Honey_ competed with the clatter of water and the hum of pipes from the shower and the closer, sparser sound of rain pecking against the windows. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell in different frequencies; the depth of his breathing and the shallow tap of his heart. The doorbell rang.   
For a moment Toshiya didn't even respond: just lay staring still at the ceiling. When he stood up it felt like somebody else doing it, as though he'd given over control of himself for a moment. His head spun for a moment. The bell rang twice more whilst he messily swiped the cum from his skin with his discarded T-shirt and then yanked his sweater on over his bare chest, stepped into a pair of sweatpants and made his way from the bedroom to the front door, where he stopped. His legs were shaking a little from exertion, like they were going to collapse beneath him; he braced his knees and grimaced slightly at the weird discomfort in his lower body.   
'Yeah. Who is it?'  
'Toshiya?'  
'_Kaoru_?'  
He felt suddenly not clean enough, his belly sticky against his sweater. He steadied himself against the door.  
'Kaoru,' he repeated in a more normal tone of voice, 'What are you doing here?'  
'Huh? Oh...' there was an uncomfortable pause, and Toshiya cursed every ancestor he had that he'd never fucking got his act together and asked his landlord to install a peephole in the door; what he wouldn't give right now to see the look on Kaoru's face as he spoke, or what he was doing with his hands, or what was going on in those dark, closed-off eyes of his. 'I just – you weren't answering your phone, so I – I thought I'd drop by. Sorry. I just...'   
It was hard to tell through the door, but Toshiya thought he heard him sigh. 'I feel really bad about what happened today.'   
Unconsciously, Toshiya's body relaxed a little against the door.   
'Yeah?' he asked quietly.  
'Yeah. Can I come in?'  
'Oh. Um...' he gritted his teeth, casting around desperately: of all the things to hate about Kaoru, his timing right now had to be top of the fucking list. Toshiya felt his fingers curl uselessly against the clothes he wore; there it was again, that feeling of filthiness. His stomach was doing that fluttery thing like earlier.  
'Look...' Kaoru's voice through the door was soft, 'Toshiya, _please_? Please let me in? I came all the way here in the rain and I – I really want to talk to you. I know you're upset and probably...probably really pissed off as well, which is, you know, fair, so I just...I mean, if you're mad at me we don't have to – but you can't avoid us forever, you know, there's still work tomorrow and then every day after that so—'  
Toshiya opened the door. He couldn't help it: Kaoru just sounded so pitiful, and so cold, and worst of all was how he sounded so _cautious_, like he was being as careful as he possibly could.  
'Hi,' Kaoru said a little breathlessly. He was dripping from head to toe, and as he shifted awkwardly his shoes made squishing noises. His glasses were fogging up, and he took them off but then didn't seem to know what to do with them, and so settled for holding them by one of the arms and waving them at Toshiya awkwardly. 'Thanks.'  
'I don't have long,' Toshiya blurted a little harshly, and Kaoru gave a quick nod.  
'Okay. I just – I'm sorry.'   
Toshiya blinked. 'What?'  
'I'm sorry, Toshiya. For what happened. And also—' he visibly floundered, apparently unsure what to do with his hands; he settled for cramming them into his pockets, glasses and all. 'Also, I'm sorry about what I said. It was...' he hesitated. 'Not cool.'   
And weirdly enough, that was what made Toshiya feel like he was about to lose it and sob his guts out: the fucking _lameness_ of those words, the look of deep, crippling discomfort on Kaoru's face. It hurt him that Kaoru had said what he had, and it hurt that he was now trying to make it better purely because he was doing such a shitty job of it. Deep down, he realised, he had been counting on Kaoru to somehow fix everything. He'd been counting on him to smooth it over so well that Toshiya couldn't stay mad at him, couldn't stay sad, and what made him want to cry now was the sudden understanding that maybe that wasn't possible. That Kaoru looked just as helpless and lost as he felt inside.  
He heard it very faintly as the shower stopped its background hum; he looked briefly upwards, just in case there was a chance any ambivalent god up there might change his mind and give him a fucking break.   
'Are you okay?'  
He tried to speak but his words balled themselves up in his throat and came out as an ugly gulping noise, and he swallowed in a way that felt painful.  
'I'm fine,' Toshiya said in a stranger's voice.   
'Okay.' Kaoru pushed back his hood, pulling his beanie off with it, and sort of ruffled his hair up agitatedly. 'I don't – look, I don't know if you want to talk about what happened, or if you do but just not right now, or if maybe you just _don't_ and—'  
'Hey, Toshiya, is that the food? Oh.'   
Toshiya allowed himself to close his eyes for a short moment, and when he opened them again he found Kosuke striding towards them, big as life, a towel slung casually around his waist and his skin pleasantly flushed from his shower; he slid an arm around Toshiya's belly and pulled them together, his head perched playfully on Toshiya's shoulder. There were a few tattoos on his arms and they were dark, vivid, pretty. Toshiya wanted to stare at them until everything else went away.  
'We ordered take-out,' Toshiya said weakly.  
'Yeah, and look how hot the delivery boy is.' Kosuke smile charmingly, nodding at Kaoru, who was looking at him as though he'd fallen through a hole in the ceiling rather than simply wandered in from the bathroom. 'Kidding,' he said easily. 'Hi. I'm Kosuke.'   
Kaoru didn't yet seem capable of speech.  
'This is Kaoru,' Toshiya said numbly, and their eyes met, and maybe it was something in them – something desperate and sort of cringing, ashamed; _scared_, almost – that made Kaoru snap out of it, give his head a little shake (water droplets flew out in all directions, annoyingly adorably, like he was a dog), flick his wide, unreadable eyes from Toshiya to Kosuke and give him a quick, abbreviated bow in response.   
'Hi,' he said in a rush, 'I'm his guitarist. I mean, he's my bassist. Our bassist. I'm – sorry, I wasn't expecting anybody else to be here. I just – I just dropped by, but it's fine; it can wait.' He cleared his throat awkwardly, 'But it's good to meet you. Kosuke. I'm sorry, I didn't know Toshiya was—' here his eyes jumped very briefly towards Toshiya, 'seeing anybody.'   
'Not your fault,' Kosuke said amiably, 'We've only been together for – what would you say, Toshi, an hour? Hour and a quarter?'  
Toshiya laughed faintly, bloodlessly.   
'But you're Kaoru from the band! I've heard _lots_ about you.'   
'Good things, I hope,' Kaoru said feebly.   
'Oh, yeah. I feel like I know you already.'   
'That's great,' Kaoru said with effort, 'I'd...I mean, I look forward to getting to know you, as well, but...this doesn't look like the right time.' He gave a painful, flinching sort of smile. 'I'm so sorry I intruded. I'll leave.'  
'Stay,' Toshiya said weakly, 'There's so much to talk about.'   
'No, I should really—' Kaoru cut himself off with a chuckle that was very unlike him, 'I'll talk to you another time. I just...I'm sorry. That's all.' He met Toshiya's eye squarely. 'I'm sorry.'   
Toshiya swallowed heavily and gave him a light, twitchlike nod.   
'That's okay,' he said softly.  
'Cool. I...guess I'll see you tomorrow, then.'   
'Yeah. I guess so.'   
'Yeah. Yeah, okay. Good to meet you, Ko – Kosuke? Yeah. Good to meet you.' Kaoru shrugged helplessly, looking for all the world as though he wanted to simply fade away, 'Bye.'  
He left, and Toshiya shut the door with a quiet click. Kosuke's arms tightened around his waist, squeezing him nicely, and he felt a soft kiss press itself against his cheek.   
'So that's Mr Band Leader, huh?'  
'That's him.'  
'Wow.'   
'Wow what?'  
'He's not really what I was expecting. Not exactly the slick guy from the city you told me about.'   
'I never said he was slick.'   
'You said he was charismatic.' Kosuke paused, and Toshiya felt his smile against his shoulder, 'So based on how extremely fucking _awkward_ that was...you two've fucked, or what?'  
'What?! _No_.' Toshiya gripped Kosuke's arms around his body tightly, 'He's not even – he's straight.'   
Kosuke frowned. 'You sure about that?'  
'_Yes_, I'm sure about that.'   
'Huh. Pity,' he said teasingly. 'I guess only straight boys are that—' he did a little impression, ducking his body awkwardly around behind Toshiya's, 'wooden.'  
'Leave him alone,' Toshiya said defensively, 'He was nice to you.'   
'Of course,' Kosuke said, sounding surprised. 'Sorry.'   
'Yeah.' Toshiya sighed. 'No, I'm sorry. It was just a long day today, that's all. Just sort of – stressful. Sorry.' He shook his head, 'I guess I'm kind of tense.'  
'I have a good cure for that, you know.'   
'I bet you do.'   
Kosuke gave him a light squeeze. 'I'm really glad you changed your mind, you know,' he said, more seriously. 'It's going to be fun. I promise.'   
  
_It is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base and pursued them across the galaxy. Evading the dreaded Imperial Starfleet, a group of freedom fighters led by Luke Skywalker has established a new secret base on the remote ice world of Hoth. The evil lord Darth Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker, has dispatched thousands of remote probes into the far reaches of space..._  
As the familiar music swelled Kyo scrunched himself up into a smaller ball on his sofa, huddling deep down into the darkness. He felt sick and full, as though he'd been cramming himself with sugar; cake and meringue and icing and syrup, clinging to his teeth. Sickly and sticky. Stuffed. Even being back home alone in his apartment wasn't making him feel safe and enclosed and better the way it usually did.  
He'd have to be ages away with Luke Skywalker on the planet Hoth before he felt normal. It would take about hundred million light years of distance to make him sleep.  
Every time he closed his eyes he could see Die and the stupid sympathetic tilt that he'd given to his head and eyebrows and the gentle way his mouth had gone, smiling the way people smile when there's nothing to be happy about. The way he'd touched Toshiya's arm and joked around with him, such a fucking feeble joke, _fuck_. It pressed Kyo's eyes into slits and pulled his lips back in a snarl that was almost a grin; made the cords stand out in his neck; made him grip the top of his sofa cushion and take the biggest, most choking mouthful of it that he could to muffle his yell. He'd thought some sort of curse word was going to come out, but in the end it was just an inarticulate noise.   
He thought he should have been born on Tatooine. He would pay for his sour thoughts with each hot, dusty lungful of desert air, and if the scant humans grew to be too much then he could simply disappear into the Dune Sea and live his life by the movements of the twin suns. He could write notes in the sand until he died, and when he was gone they would blow and shift away so nobody but him would ever, ever read them. He would die of dehydration or starvation or exposure or, if he decided to take matters into his own hands, he could simply drop into the mouth of the sarlacc. Curl up into a ball in there and slowly be fed on over a thousand of years, relaxing into the dark and the wet, the spurt and acid of digestive juices. Was there anything nobler than being eaten?  
On the screen Han (_I'd fuck Han because he's so bossy,_ Toshiya said in his head) was using Luke's (_and_ _I'd marry Luke because he's good_) lightsaber to slit open the belly of the dead tauntaun. As Kyo watched, he tenderly pushed Luke inside that stinking heat, saving him. Clever trick. He hoped that if he had been in their situation he would have come up with that, but he thought instead he would have just lain down in the snow and let the white sky fall against him in a crush.

That evening, Kaoru got to work cleaning his apartment.  
He made it so that every surface gleamed with its own light and, when he found that he had too much stuff to tidy away into closets, he grabbed a black trashbag and started mindlessly hurling things into it to be hauled out to the kerb.   
And it felt _good_, doing that; stripping the place down, like nobody had ever lived here. It felt so good that once he'd started it was almost impossible to stop, and before he knew it he was crushing mint condition figurines underfoot and ripping posters from the walls, tearing them to shreds: Kitty Pryde, Spider-Man, Amuro Ray, Superman, Nightcrawler, Akira, Black Widow; they unfurled in thick poster-paper drifts that cut his fingers and made satisfying noises when he stamped them into scribbles.   
_Nerd_, he thought savagely. Fucking _nerd_. He slammed his fist against the wall in a way that dented the plaster; rock star, guitar hero, so fucking, _fucking_ uncool, such a stupid stammering _loser_, and the thought that rose up before he could cut it off at the root was _if you don't grow up and leave this kid stuff behind then Toshiya's never going to look at you_.  
He straightened up, heart thudding dryly in his throat. Spider-Man was creased beneath his feet and he stepped off of him carefully, bending down to smooth the poster out again, but his fingers trembled so much he couldn't do it and so instead he ripped it, shakily, down the middle.   
He wanted Toshiya to look at him. To like him.  
As a thought it was too bulky, too big. It stuck in his throat like a huge, powdery pill.   
He wanted Toshiya to want him. He wanted to hold him, kiss him, go home with him. This boy. He wanted this boy to touch and have and love.  
His face reflected in the blank television screen looked ill.   
He sat down heavily on the sofa and put his head in his hands, and for a few painful, lucid moments, all the other shit going around his head – about Toshiya being a man and how that could ever, _ever_ work and how it would _feel_, how weird, how hot but weird, _gross_, gorgeous, how he would even go about doing it – all that stuff faded into the background, because there was something small and spiky and obstructive that he was missing, something that stood in the way—  
That it was no good realising this now, because Toshiya already had somebody.   
He had called and called and Toshiya hadn't picked up because he was already occupied with somebody else, and this stranger Kosuke, this sudden rival, had won before Kaoru had even realised that they were competing. He'd waited too long; been too late by – what had Kosuke said, an _hour_?  
Rewind the day and he could have been different; better. Could have ignored Kyo's insinuations; could have stood by Toshiya's side. Taken him home. Spent the day laughing with him and playing music with him and looking at his infuriating, insufferable, wholly beautiful face.


	21. Chapter 21

The next morning dawned a dim, misty blue. It was the sort of morning where the sun might not have risen at all, and where it might or might not have been raining: the windows were beaded with condensation and when Kaoru stuck his hand outside he couldn't feel anything, but all the pavements were soaked dark and cold drips were falling from every eave and overhang and twig in the city. The sky was the kind of royal blue that, without context, could have kidded you into thinking it was midsummer, but in fact it was cold and not fully light and six o'clock in the morning on another dank day in December. Soon it would be New Year's Eve, Kaoru thought, and Yoshiki's annual party, and another night of gritting his teeth so harshly that his jaw ached. And then January, and their new album would come out. And then February, and his birthday would come around again and he would be twenty-eight years old.  
The number seemed huge out of all proportion. It sat fatly on the middle distance and yawned like a slob.  
When Kaoru had pictured this time in his life, it had looked different; he had wanted to feel, in his late twenties, that he had made it. Now, they had only _sort_ of made it. Their records sold well – or, they did all right – but there was always that slippery, thin-ice feeling that kept him from ever feeling truly comfortable. Like everything might fall apart in a moment; like your vocalist might, out of the blue, start a whole crusade against your bassist, and like you might find yourself paralysed for how to react because you had only just caught on that you were hopelessly, stupidly, head-over-heels in love with that same bassist. Like that.  
Although Kaoru had to admit that was a rather unique example.  
The air in his apartment felt thin with the chill of the morning; the empty spaces where all his junk had been seemed raw and pale, like something vulnerable exposed, the white belly of a fish. He dumped coffee into his percolator and lit a cigarette by the window. The percolator rumbled and groused. Kaoru bit his nails.  
There was a chance, he thought with a grim sort of optimism, that this was just one of his weird, insomnia-induced emotional phases. Too much stress and too little sleep and too much of Toshiya being _right there_, looking so hurt and so alone and so completely pissed off – wasn't it possible that the general sense of anxiety he felt about the bassist had confused itself? Just for a moment? Wasn't it possible that his own need, his own want – to be soothed, to be held – had simply latched onto the person who held the most of his focus, the way a drowning man will cling to absolutely anything to keep himself afloat?  
It was not, he saw, impossible. Potentially it was almost _probable_. Whoever heard of somebody completely subverting their sworn, hand-to-god, tried-and-true sexual orientation overnight? Nobody. Never.  
And _probable_ was okay, for now. It wasn't ideal, but he could work with it: could push back a shadow of a doubt and still look Toshiya in the eye, maybe. Could still do what needed to be done.  
The sky was whitening now, in the distance; the clouds were making bruise-coloured shapes against it. In an hour or two it would have crept high enough in the sky to filter past the other high-rises and into Toshiya's east-facing bedroom window, and it would lie across his body where his limbs were curled up with Kosuke's.  
He poured the fresh coffee from his percolator into a mug, added a clumsy splash of cold water right from the tap, and took a swig. It didn't even taste that bitter. It tasted like earth.  
He tried to picture them fucking but found that he couldn't: his mind just couldn't make the picture. He knew how two men were supposed to do it, in theory – what was supposed to go where, and everything – but when he tried to contort Toshiya into that kind of shape he came up against a sort of mental barrier. He remembered seeing graffiti in a high school bathroom stall, claiming that so-and-so was not just a fag but a fag who went on the _bottom_, the worst kind of fag to be. Now he found himself wondering what Toshiya liked to do; how one man was even supposed to broach that kind of discussion with the other. What if a man found himself with somebody who liked to occupy the same role as him; were they supposed to just call it quits, shake hands and walk away? And what if Toshiya preferred to be the one on top? Kaoru didn't think he could be fucked like _that_ no matter who was doing it.  
He knuckled his forehead roughly. The truth was, it didn't matter what Toshiya liked to do in the bedroom, because he already had somebody to do it with, and Kaoru was sure that even if he didn't, it wouldn't change anything. Besides, something about the situation reminded him uncomfortably of himself in high school, pining over the prettiest and most popular girls, the ones with the expensive perfume, the beauty-parlour skin, the candy-coloured nails. They laughed at him then. It was entirely likely that Toshiya might laugh at him now. Maybe not right to his face – Kaoru didn't think he'd be that rude – but how could he know that the second he turned away, Toshiya would be clutching at his own ribs, biting the insides of his own cheeks to keep the laughter in?  
He groaned aloud and rubbed both hands harshly over his face. Really, though, it was just for show. Not that anybody was watching, but it was easier to pantomime frustration than acknowledge the truth of what he felt inside, which was a kind of numbness. Or no, more like an emptiness. Like he had carved some huge space out of himself, and now he had nothing to fill it with.  
  
When Toshiya woke up that morning he had a feeling of fuzzy unreality, as though he had drifted completely clear from his own skin. His life, from the outside, suddenly appeared impossibly perfect: here he was – skinny, scrappy, lonely Toshiya from Nowheresville, Nagano – waking up as a rock star (well, nearly) in the neon-bright heart of Osaka with the arms of a genuinely very cute man wrapped around him, reassuringly heavy when he sat up, reassuringly _there__._  
The unlikelihood of it all made his skin prickle all over, made adrenaline shake his bones and sicken his stomach as though he'd just been yanked back from the precipice of some dreadful fate, shocked from the nearness of his miss. He couldn't help but wonder what had happened to that first Toshiya; the one with the homemade clothes and the overlong hair and the cheap cosmetics smeared clumsily over his face, facing down Kaoru – unbelievably, back then, a stranger – on the street outside of a live house, so desperate to be noticed. He wondered what had happened to the boy who had left his bass on the seat of a city bus and gone on a furious, rain-drenched crusade through the unfamiliar city streets to his bandmate's apartment, slept in his bed, cum in his sheets, developed a nagging crush that re-emerged at his most painful and uncontrolled moments: drunk in a hotel room in Nagano; high out of his mind in a rich guy's swimming pool; sitting out in that first, fragile Osaka snowfall.  
It was like he just didn't exist any more. He had the souvenirs from those times: had the photographs of that clumsy haircut, had the same guitar case, had the crush. But he himself, the person who had actually experienced those things first-hand, seemed to have faded out of existence. And good riddance, Toshiya thought sharply, except that he actually missed him.  
That boy never took any shit.  
That boy would have known what to do.  
He was determined to be early to the studio. He knew that if he procrastinated then there was a very small but very real and frightening chance that he would simply never go back at all, and so he found himself brushing his teeth, washing his face, kneeling on the floor beside Kosuke's sleeping body to kiss him on the cheek, murmur in his ear that he had to go.  
'You're leaving me here?' was the sleepy mumble he got in response, and he snorted a laugh even though he felt like he was about to throw up.  
'I'm sorry.'  
'How do you know I'm not gonna steal all your shit?'  
Very gently, Toshiya stroked the hair back from his face. Kosuke gave him a lazy smile and then closed his eyes again.  
'Just a hunch,' Toshiya said softly. 'I'll call you.'  
'Mm. Do that.'  
  
Of course, he wasn't the first one at the studio. He arrived at just past nine to find that Kaoru had beaten him to it by about two hours: the guitarist was already deeply immersed, his mouth a grim line and his eyes faraway and focussed between the headphones propped over his ears, staring seriously down at the few scattered sheets of lyrics arranged over bars of songs he had in front of him. He looked up when the door slammed, and shot Toshiya a twitchy, frightened smile.  
He looked fucking terrible, and Toshiya might have said as much had he not been so sure that he was looking pretty abysmal himself.  
'Good morning,' Kaoru said politely.  
'Yeah, morning. Hi.' Toshiya dropped his bag on the sofa uneasily. 'Are we the first ones?'  
'Yes. We are.' Kaoru slid the headphones off to dangle around his neck and gave Toshiya a hopeless sort of look. 'Normally Shinya arrives around half past. He'll just be walking—'  
'His dog, right.'  
Toshiya licked his lips nervously, stuck his hands in his pockets. Kaoru cleared his throat.  
'Your friend seemed nice,' he said after a long moment of strained silence.  
'Oh, yeah. Thank you,' Toshiya said carefully. 'He liked you, too.'  
Kaoru gave him a stiff, altogether miserable smile. 'I'm glad,' he said, and then, with the air of somebody reading from a script, 'If he's going to be a part of your life, I'd like to get to know him.'  
'I don't know if it's all that serious,' Toshiya said, sitting down beside him. He was aware of moving in a way he wasn't accustomed to; sort of stingily, like he didn't have superfluous energy to waste. Even so, Kaoru – well, didn't _flinch_, not exactly – but where the sleeves of his T-shirt ended, Toshiya saw the muscles in his arms tense, and his old friend and leader reached quickly for a glass of water and gulped down about a third of it. 'We only just got together,' Toshiya continued, the sick feeling stronger than ever. 'He might have changed his mind by next week.'  
Kaoru was quiet for a moment, staring into the glass of water as if it held all the answers.  
'That's no attitude to take,' he said finally. 'Although I guess you never know.'  
'No. You never know.'  
The silence between them was thick and gluey as oatmeal and it stuck in their throats. Toshiya shifted where he sat and Kaoru got to his feet, turning a flinching motion into a smooth one as he crossed over to the window. It wasn't the proper kind of window – the kind that would open wide like a mouth and let a person hang out, a pendulum at the height of its upswing, all the noise and bustle and life down below. It was the narrow, mean kind of window found in very budget hotels, the kind made of slats that could be made to rotate when you needed fresh air. Kaoru rotated them now even though it was still cold and damp outside, the city still dripping and the sky the flat white of oyster shells.  
'What happened yesterday sucked,' Kaoru said suddenly, staring out into the city, his posture very rigid. 'I'm sorry.'  
Toshiya shrugged even though Kaoru wasn't looking at him. 'Yeah.'  
'Do you have a plan?'  
'For Kyo?'  
Kaoru nodded, and Toshiya hugged his arms tightly around his chest. 'No plan,' he said quietly. 'Just – see what happens, I guess. Think he'll show?'  
'I think so.'  
'I don't know what I can do.' He gave a mirthless sort of laugh. 'You like giving orders. Tell me.'  
'I don't—'  
'No, come on, leader,' Toshiya said, '_Tell_ me.'  
He stopped short. His voice had come out savage in a way that surprised him, and he gripped himself harder than ever. He wanted to say sorry but he was afraid that he really would be sick if he opened his mouth; gently he started to rock himself back and forth. He wished, suddenly, that he was small enough to be rocked for real; to be held like that, soothed like that. Small enough to be helpless, and have other people make all the decisions for him.  
Even though Kaoru had his back to him the glass all around made a dozen ghostly reflections of them both; he could see Kaoru watching him, although when their reflected gazes met he looked away.  
'I wish I knew the answer,' Kaoru said, his voice stilted and restrained in a way that Toshiya hated.  
'It's not your problem to solve.'  
'That's not true. We're all part of it.' In front of the window, Kaoru's shoulders slackened and his head fell slightly. 'I said some – pretty unforgivable things.'  
Toshiya smiled grimly.  
'That's up to me, isn't it?'  
'Huh?  
'Whether it's unforgivable or not.'  
In direct violation of the no-smoking-inside rule that Shinya had begged and pleaded for, Kaoru broke and lit a cigarette. With a painful sort of movement he turned around to face him, his back to the great white sky in a way that made him appear tiny.  
'What are you saying?' he asked plainly, and Toshiya gave a humourless little snort.  
'I'm saying I forgive you.'  
'You don't—'  
'Kaoru.' Their gazes met squarely, and Toshiya shot him a weak sort of smile. 'I need you too much,' he said clearly.  
'Toshiya, I don't – I know I said some awful things but I'm on your _side_, I—'  
'I don't need you to be on my _side_, Kaoru. I'm not looking for _allies_; I just...' he shook his head and, at a loss for any other way to express his exasperation, settled for simply crumpling some of the paper from the floor up into a ball and chucking it as hard as he could at Kaoru's chest. It bounced off lamely.  
'I don't need you to fight my battles,' Toshiya said forcefully, 'I need you as my _friend_, you idiot.'  
Kaoru's cigarette tasted dirty so early in the morning; after a few half-hearted drags, he pitched it. He was having trouble gathering enough breath together anyway; his heart and lungs both seemed to be working too fast. He wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like.  
Still: 'That the way you speak to your friends?' he said in a voice that attempted to be light, flippant, but broke over the high tones. For a moment he was stunned by how purely he could still manage to despise himself.  
'Yeah, I guess it is,' Toshiya said, smiling at him. Not exactly a happy smile, but good enough.  
And god, Kaoru thought, it was so fucking hopeless, and he was in such deep shit. People weren't even supposed to look attractive when they were tense and down to the fucking wire but Toshiya, Toshiya, Toshiya, contrary to the fucking end; wouldn't you know it, his worry and anger made him seem suddenly _beautiful_ in a sad, tough, absolutely untouchable kind of way, the way he had used to look all the time back in the early days, and the way he had looked that night when he had slept at Kaoru's after their first big fight, the night Toshiya had—  
_'I'm sorry I bit you.'  
_And he could remember thinking that it was sort of cute, at the time, could remember not admitting to himself that he found it not just cute but _hot_, actually, and could remember lying to himself that it was the bite instead of what it actually was, which was the way the two of them had been tussling, rolling around on the floor and grasping at each other; _that_ was what was hot and he had been dreaming, dreaming, _dreaming_ about it ever since; their young bodies, that feeling of falling. Hopeless.  
So, so fucking hopeless.  
So he smiled back at Toshiya the best he could and thought: okay. Yeah. He was beautiful; he found him beautiful.  
But it could be all right, maybe, just to be near him, and just to be close to him and know that Toshiya would touch him sometimes on the arm, or the knee, or the back of the neck, and that there would be tours with him and rooms shared with him and endless bus journeys crammed in next to him, hearing the second-hand music from his headphones, smelling the second-hand smoke on his skin.  
'I'm serious, Kaoru,' Toshiya said softly, still looking at him, 'I need you to be my friend. I...' he shrugged, smiled at him a little more naturally, 'I don't know what I'd do without you.'  
The door opened in a rush of fresh air: Shinya bustling in, his cheeks pink from the cold. He saw Toshiya and smiled, said hello. He gave Kaoru a little bow, put down his bag; the ball of paper that Toshiya had thrown at Kaoru was smoothed out and replaced in the pile, and as if nothing at all had happened, the day begun. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the weirdest things about writing a story set nearly 20 years ago is having people smoke inside. Feels wrong, man.


	22. Chapter 22

What was most surprising was how  _normal_ everything turned out to be, in the end. Kyo arrived to the studio last, but that wasn't unusual in itself, and although for a few hours Toshiya held himself tense and nervous and miserable, desperate to avoid eye contact with the singer at all costs, he realised at length that Kyo was awarding him the same courtesy. They might as well have been ghosts to each other.  
Sort of like Kaoru, if you really thought about it; Kaoru, back in the old days when they didn't talk. Back in the  _really_ bad days when they'd been recording  Gauze under Yoshiki's supervision and every single day had felt like the gulf between them was widening, stranding Toshiya on some distant shore. He couldn't figure out why that had felt so much worse than this, when it felt like it should be the other way around. This was the fresh one; the raw one.  
But he guessed he'd been so much younger then. He and Kyo, they weren't kids. They could handle this.  
It was a weird thought: that this was the way it would be from now on; that things could actually work like this. He thought of times with Kyo onstage, resting his head on the shorter man's shoulder, slinging an arm around him, crushing him into a mutually sweaty hug; playing next to him, slinking right down back-to-back with him, laughing with him. Standing out on a fire escape after a show, and smoking with him. How amazingly  _zen_ he went after a performance, like he'd been hollowed out. Like he'd been filled with light.  
Across the room Kyo was bent over his notebook, scribbling furiously. His hair slipped forwards, and the line of piercings in his ear glinted like a warning.  
When Toshiya tipped his head back he thought he caught just a hint of Kosuke's scent, like it might have been caught in his hair or something, or on his collar. Unconsciously he leant further back into the sofa, letting his lower back curve and his knees spread a little, his chin nestling sideways into his own shoulder. The smell was there; the smell of his skin. His pulse throbbed in his neck. The neck that Kosuke had kissed, had bit.  
He smiled. He didn't close his eyes; that would have made it too obvious that he was tuning out. Instead he kept them open, staring dreamily at a fixed point in the middle distance where Kosuke might or might not appear, smiling at him, stripping off his soaking wet work shirt.   
  
That night Kosuke said to him,  _I'm going to make you enjoy this city. Every inch of it_ .  
Work had lasted far too long, hours and hours of listening blankly to the rough cuts of Kaoru's melodies for  _Kigan_ , ostensibly trying to place a supportive bassline in amongst it but instead coasting. Dreaming awake. Like he'd wandered out of range of his band's signal.  
And now he was  drunk. R ed-cheeked, giggly, affectionate drunk, leaning into Kosuke's side right there on the street and clinging to a handful of his shirt, and the strained scene with Kaoru in the early morning and the icy way Kyo had looked through him and the awkward way Shinya and Die had tiptoed around it all were all evaporating like so much morning frost in the sunshine. The sky had darkened and it was cold but he could hardly feel it, and the streets were reflecting neon lights and full of people, cigarette smoke, car exhaust, cooking smells. He hadn't eaten and his whole body felt light and jittery, buoyant enough to float. Kosuke's hand was on his waist, and he steered him.  
'Where do you normally go around here?'  
'Here? Um.' He tucked some hair sloppily behind his ear, trying to force himself to concentrate, 'Just Kuro, really.'   
'Kuro?'  
'Yeah.'  
' _Kuro_ .'  
' _Yes_ .'  
' _You_ go to Kuro.'  
'Yes, I go to Kuro! What's wrong with that?'  
'I'm sorry, I just didn't realise that you were a hundred years old.'   
'It's not that bad.'  
'Toshiya, everybody in that bar is on their  _death_ bed. I'm pretty sure they keep extra oxygen tanks in the back, just in case.'   
'That,' Toshiya said, tipsily indignant, 'Is just not true.'   
' _This_ is why you don't like Osaka. If you're always going to the same old bar, with the same old men...and I do mean  _old_ men.  _God_ , Toshiya.'   
'They happen to be my friends. And I like it there; it's quiet.'  
'Oh, wow, quiet,' Kosuke rolled his eyes, 'Why didn't you say? That's exactly what I look for on a night out; silence.'   
'You know what?' Toshiya slurred a little, looking around, 'My place is a fucking  _dump_ .'  
Kosuke laughed, squeezing him closer.   
'I mean it. I do. It's a dump and I'm going to –  _move_ .'   
'Oh, I don't know about  _that_ .' He smiled into Toshiya's face, touched his cheek, smoothed some hair behind his ear. 'You look pretty cute all wide-eyed like this, rock star. You'd better not move too far.' He kissed him, very softly, on the cheek. 'I like you easy to find.'   
'We can't kiss on the street,' was all Toshiya managed to say.  
'I know, but look what happened.' He patted Toshiya's hip gently, steering him, 'C'mon. Let's go in here.'  
It was nice, really, to be led. To not have to think. Kosuke took him through a set of plate glass doors into a warmly lit tiled reception that smelled of various things: laundry, cleaning products, a faint hint of chlorine. Present through all of those smells was the distinct fug of heat: of warm pipes, wood baking in a sauna, radiator panels. Toshiya gripped Kosuke's wrist tightly.  
'Kosuke,' he hissed, 'We can't do this. I don't have anything with me. Kosuke. Kosuke!'  
'Toshiya, what do you think you're going to need? Haven't you ever been to a place like this before?'  
'Well...' Toshiya let his voice trail off doubtfully. Behind the front desk there stood a very pretty young man, who bowed and gave them a bored sort of smile. Up close he smelled of citrusy cologne.  
'Long time no see, Kosuke,' he drawled, 'It's a little quiet tonight, you know.'  
'Doesn't bother me. I'm not here for the company so much.' He squeezed Toshiya's palm, as though it was some sort of ticket of entry.  
'I've been to a regular bath house,' Toshiya said weakly, 'But never...'  
Kosuke grinned at him, showing off the slightly crooked teeth that Toshiya liked so much.  
'So what's the problem? You know what to do.' Was it Toshiya's imagination, or did the pitch of his voice lower slightly? 'We're going to get clean.'   
'I have to be sort of – discreet,' Toshiya said nervously.  
'Toshiya. You  _worry_ too much.'  
'But—'  
'I know a way we can be discreet here. Just trust me, okay?'   
Toshiya hesitated, eyeing Kosuke closely. He felt weirdly pulled, as though there was Kosuke's hand guiding him in one direction and another invisible grip trying to urge him back the way he'd come, away from danger. Small hands, but determined. So determined. But not, after all, real.  
_Let them all know_ , he thought suddenly, surprising himself with the venom in it,  _fuck it, let the whole world find out. I don't care_ .  
'Okay,' Toshiya said. This time, when Kosuke went to kiss his cheek, he shifted his stance so that the other man's lips met his mouth instead. Almost shyly, they smiled at each other, and Toshiya fumbled for his credit card and then placed it gently on the counter. 'Two, please.'   
'Your treat, huh?'  
'Well, you go on five dates a week. May as well lighten the load if I can.'   
'Considerate of you.'  
'Yeah, isn't it.'   
The receptionist swiped Toshiya's credit card and set two clean towels on the counter for them. Toshiya bundled both to his chest, trying to ignore the funny, wry sort of look Kosuke was giving him. His head felt fuzzy: he shook it gently.  
' _What_ ?' he hissed as the receptionist bowed them through the sliding doors at the back of the room, and as soon as they closed behind them, Kosuke wrapped his arms around Toshiya's waist. The smell of chlorine was stronger here.   
'I can see you thinking about it,' Kosuke said gently. 'Wondering who I've brought here before. Am I right?'   
They found themselves in a deserted changing room, and Toshiya busied himself selecting a wood panelled locker.  
'Be weird if I wasn't, wouldn't I?' he asked as casually as he could. He didn't really feel any great desire to go ahead and start stripping off. He sat down on a bench and hugged the towels tighter to him.  
'You want me to name them?'  
'Not particularly.'   
'Toshiya.'   
Kosuke took off his coat and unwound his scarf. He peeled off his sweater and T-shirt as one; threw the bundle of clothing a little cockily onto the bench beside where Toshiya sat. 'This has to be okay with you if this is going to work.'  
'It  _is_ okay.'  
Kosuke sighed. 'You're not being super convincing, you know.'  
'What would convince you?'  
'I don't know, just—'  
'This?' Toshiya asked innocently, yanking his shirt quickly over his head, 'This?' He stood up, undoing his belt buckle one-handed, 'This?' He unzipped his jeans. Took them off as one with his underwear, followed them with his socks and stood there entirely bare. 'Kosuke, I'm fine. I swear it. I just don't want you thinking about anyone else when we're together, that's all.' He hesitated. 'Only me.'   
Kosuke's face relaxed. 'Only you,' he said, and lightly touched Toshiya's side. It felt temporarily miraculous, the way the cup of his palm conformed itself so perfectly to the tender, delicate shape of Toshiya's ribs. 

Kaoru didn't take his usual route home that night. Or at least he started to, but then he somehow lost himself. He got off the bus at the Tsutenkaku Tower and then hesitated, suddenly feeling a deep itch of resistance at the idea of going home: it was the first night in a while that it wasn't raining, and people were out on the streets. The air was cold enough to give their voices a thin, tinny kind of sound; his footfalls on the pavement sounded almost as though he was walking on something metallic. They were wealthy enough now, as a band, for each of them to have multiple instruments strewn about between their homes and their studio, and so he travelled without a guitar case hoisted high on his back. He felt strangely unencumbered, a feeling that wasn't entirely positive. He felt too free, as though he might drift away. Or do something stupid.   
Abruptly he turned north, cutting directly beneath the straddled legs of the tower, past people who were standing in clumps and taking selfies with digital cameras awkwardly held aloft. They looked so enthusiastic, so fervent; so red-cheeked and eager in the cold. He couldn't imagine how they found the energy.   
He could walk an almost straight line from here and end up in Doyama, where Toshiya went out drinking. A gay bar. He wasn't sure if he'd ever even seen the outside of one; certainly he'd never ventured inside. The idea made him feel young and uncomfortable and _unformed_, somehow; painfully, frustratingly naïve, the same way he'd felt in high school when it had turned out that the building just a few blocks down from their playing field was not a bathhouse at all but actually a brothel, an open secret that everybody had known but him. The part that made him grit his teeth now was how seedy the place had looked; how obvious, with its completely blank neon pink sign and the painted-over windows on the upper floor. Thinking about it, he wanted to smack his younger self around the face.   
Still, he found himself sticking out an arm obediently when a cab went by. And when it ignored him and carried on driving, he found himself following his feet to the street outside Ebisucho Station, where there was an eager cluster of taxis waiting and he could clamber into one right away. Settled on the back seat, he felt weary. He felt he was watching himself through a window and thinking how fucking foolish he looked.   
'Doyama, please.' What a stupid thought, that he was going to march straight up there: it was a good six kilometres. And god knew how he was going to get home at the end of all this, when the buses and trains weren't running any more and there were no cabs to be found at all and it would be cold and dark and he would be alone, all alone, in a future that seemed somehow unimaginable to him, as though he was going to become a different person altogether.   
  
His first surprise – astonishment, really – was how many gay places opened up at night, when in the daytime they looked as dull and ordinary as anything else. Now the streets were full of people, laughing and talking and having a good time in the cold, sharp night, men and women both, and there seemed to be signs everywhere for gay bars and gay clubs and gay _bathhouses_, even. Even some of the restaurants had little rainbow stickers on their doors, and Kaoru didn't know if that meant gay friendly or gay anything or what, but it was enough to make him feel sick and lost and ill-at-ease. It was like being somewhere foreign. Like being somewhere where everybody knew the rules, except him. In the presence of that innocent rainbow flag, everything else – the convenience stores and pachinko parlours and karaoke dens – simply faded into the background.  
_All right_, he told himself firmly, _I will close my eyes just for a second, and when I open them again, I will pick a place and go in, sit down and have a drink_.  
For the first time ever he found himself wondering how Toshiya must have felt, moving straight from the country into all this noise and rush. He thought it must have been terrifying. It was so easy to forget, thinking of him now, that when Toshiya had come to them he'd been such a _boy_; that when he and Kaoru had first met, he'd been hardly more than a child.  
_You're in that band, aren't you? Charm?_  
Kaoru could have batted that voice away, as though it was something physical. Miserably, he settled his gaze on a discreet looking place – no neons, just a plain dark sign in Japanese lettering, nothing western. Small, dark and quiet, a peeling rainbow decal stuck to the door. In the midst of the shifting, oceanic crowds Kaoru made a steady beeline for it, his head held very high. He didn't walk quickly, but he was purposeful, he thought. Purposeful enough to convince people that he knew what he was doing. Inside it was dimly lit and rather quiet, with just a few bodies at the bar and a few small groups around the sturdy wooden tables; all men, and all in suits, which made Kaoru waver a little in his step. In his jeans he felt as though there might have been a spotlight on him, although nobody did more than glance at him as he came in the door. He pulled his jacket tighter around his throat, as though a higher collar might transform it into business wear.   
Nervous, he cleared his throat. There were candles on the tabletops, and their softly lambent glow gave the air a waxy shimmer, so that the men clustered here and there appeared to be floating within a dreamlike vagueness. He felt the press of a barstool against his lower back and realised that he was sitting down. He kept his eyes low. With a muted clatter, a glass of beer and a small plate of okonomiyai was placed before him.  
The bartender seemed to have sensed his unease; he smiled and bowed but left quickly, a trim young man who Kaoru briefly attempted to find sexy, but he failed. He was good-looking, he supposed – or, was he? Kaoru honestly didn't feel very sure – but he didn't want to touch him, or kiss him, or even get to know him. He didn't feel that way about any of the men here, and it was a strange sensation: surprise, worry and relief all at once. A victory, almost, but a hollow one. Because now, every soft laugh over his shoulder might have been Toshiya's.   
His beer glass was swearing great beads of condensation, and he picked it up and drank it down just for something to do; he felt that if he was doing something then he at least wouldn't look so lost. He wasn't particularly hungry, but the food in front of him looked good; the batter was crisp and golden brown, pinpricked to let loose delicate spirals of steam, and it was sprinkled generously with slices of spring onion and bonito flakes. Actually, the moment that he tasted it, he found that he was ravenous, and he ate quickly and drained the second beer that was brought to him.  
At least half an hour, he had wanted himself to last. It had been barely ten minutes by his watch, but it felt like an eternity. Half-heartedly he ordered and drank a third glass of beer, but that didn't even take up five minutes. He knuckled his forehead roughly and thought that he felt drunk, actually. Not from the beer but from nerves, adrenaline. Felt sick and unreliable. Also, he had to pee.   
He was quite steady on his walk to the bathroom. In there, without the quiet chatter of the bar, the canned music seemed louder. In the mirror over the sinks his cheeks appeared a little pinker and he had the odd impression that he had moved somehow outside of himself, and that he was just another bystander watching his life as he screwed it all up and tangled it into knots.   
Coward, he told himself.   
He watched rigidly as the bathroom door swung open and admitted another man, slightly older, with a peaceful sort of face and a pair of rimless glasses resting on his nose. He was perhaps thirty, Kaoru thought, with the look of any ordinary salaryman, except the slight looseness, the softness, of the way his hair fell across his forehead. He caught Kaoru's eye in the mirror, and gave him a polite smile.   
Fear lunged like an animal through Kaoru's body. The terrible, can't-take-it-back feeling of having jumped from a plane, or off a cliff; he saw himself in the mirror turn, face the man, whose expression shifted to one of guarded politeness and then, understandably, horror, as Kaoru reached unsteadily out for him and touched him, actually _touched_ him on the upper arm, stroking it clumsily before his hand fell away like something dead and the man stepped sharply back.  
'What on earth are you doing?'  
'This is what you're here for, isn't it?' Kaoru forced out woodenly, his voice distant to his own ears. 'Isn't it?'  
He could not bring himself to look up. The floor was tiled and gleamed in a polished sort of way.   
'Ask Hayato behind the bar to call you a cab,' the man said at last. 'I don't think this is the right place for you.'   
His jaw clenched, Kaoru gave a stiff nod.   
'Sorry,' he managed.  
He didn't ask the bartender to call him a taxi. He made a sweeping guess at his bill, overestimating largely just in case he was wrong, threw down a handful of cash and all but ran out of the door Shoulders hunched, he walked briskly towards the mouth of the subway, not even apologising when he jostled people, going so far as to even push them aside if they got in his way; his mind felt as through it was burning in the cool air, curling up into ribbons of useless ash at the corners and folding in on itself; the beer in his stomach threatened to rebel and come crashing back up through his throat again; his hands were numb.   
_I don't think this is the right place for you. _Kaoru would have smiled, had he not been concentrating so hard on not throwing up. Of course it wasn't the right place for him; none of this was right for him.   
And yet, it was happening all the same.   
He chewed a knuckle harshly, pushed his way onto the train amongst a crowd of people in bulky coats and scarves, and in the midst of them he hid. In the movie that was his life he slunk back home like a shadow, a hunched and twisted man greedily, ruthlessly, jealously protecting whatever lay at his heart: his frightened, broken core.


	23. Chapter 23

Toshiya kept stealing glances at the clock.  
Ten, half past ten, eleven. Outside the sky was a flat, featureless white, textureless as bone, and a vile wind was whisking grit and litter and old bits of leaf along the streets in a dozen whirling eddies, and it was cold and it was dull and Kaoru was never,  _ever _ late, but he wasn't there and no amount of looking at the clock seemed to be changing that fact.  
Die hadn't appeared that morning, either. He'd begged off with a hangover. Toshiya had woken at nine, already late, with a cold spot in the bed next to him where Kosuke had slept and then stolen away, and he had showered with aching muscles and then stretched and dressed and eaten breakfast all in a kind of fog, his head pounding sickly behind the temples, thinking through everything that had happened the night before and trying to quash or at least  _reason_ with the strange, guilty feeling that was churning up his stomach.  
He was running way behind and his head was throbbing but he found himself dawdling. He stood around naked for a whole five minutes and then, instead of getting dressed, put a Blondie CD on and let his body sag against the wall, listening to  _X Offender_ , comprehending maybe 5% of the lyrics and letting the rest simply wash over him.  
There had been three of them: him and Kosuke and somebody else, somebody other, the kind Toshiya never would normally have gone for – too conventionally handsome, too regular-looking, his face almost featureless with beauty. The three of them had gone upstairs – what kind of bathhouse had an upstairs? – where there were darkened rooms sprouting off a hallway of matching doors, and they had gone into one of those rooms and there had been a low, solid sort of bed without any sheets, like a massage table but wider, and there had been a vending machine on the wall that sold condoms in packets and tiny, single-serving bottles of lube, and Kosuke and the stranger had been laughing lowly together and the stranger had stuck something under his nose and inhaled deeply, and after a few muttered words in the dark Kosuke and Toshiya had received the same offering: little glass bottles, labels lettered in such a way that Toshiya couldn't make out in the dimness and without his glasses, and so he had simply copied Kosuke and the stranger and popped the lid and taken a long, deep sniff of the contents, and after that he had felt full of blood, hot and flushed and ready to fuck and fuck and fuck; had felt like his dick was bigger than usual, harder than usual, more insistent than usual; he had been lain on his back on the bed with the stranger between his knees, clutching at his hips and fucking his ass, and he had gazed dreamily upward as Kosuke kissed him, kissed the stranger, knelt by Toshiya's head and brushed the glistening head of his cock against his lips until Toshiya caught on and started to suck on it—  
Blondie had moved all the way on to  _Rip Her To Shreds_ ; how had  _that_ happened? Toshiya gave his head a sharp shake and moved to his dresser, picking out the first T-shirt he touched and yanking it hastily over his head.  
Afterwards he'd been dazed. Dazed and sore and sticky all over from cum, and his head had started to ache, but by then it had seemed worth it. They hadn't said goodbye to the stranger but had instead fallen into the first taxi they'd found on the street and laughed sort of deliriously all the way home, and in bed they had kissed and kissed and kissed until their limbs were weak, and finally they had simply fallen asleep together, half-dressed and tangled up like vines.   
He had loved that feeling: falling asleep like that, the safety of it. It had made him feel as though he'd lived through some hours that had been daring and adventurous and electric and, yes, frightening, but now he was comfortable and warm and held cosily in Kosuke's embrace.  
Compare it to this morning: his head about to split in two and his stomach and lower body aching and the skin around his thumbnail bleeding where he'd been biting at it. In the studio he sat on a sofa made of fake leather, and the artificial chill of it made him shiver.  
He wanted a drink, and for his real life to fade away for a while. He rubbed at his forehead.  
'Shinya,' he called meekly as the drummer passed by, a stack of papers under his arms and a steaming teacup in his hand, 'Where's Kaoru? Isn't he late?'   
'What?' Shinya blinked as if coming out of a heavy sleep, 'He's sick today. Didn't you know? I'm sure he would have left you a message.'   
'Oh. I didn't check my machine this morning.'   
Shinya nodded at him reassuringly. 'Sick,' he confirmed.   
'Kaoru's never ill. Or hardly ever.'   
'Yes, I know. But he sounded terrible.'   
'You think he's okay?'  
Shinya took a thoughtful sip of tea. 'I'm sure he would have said if something was really wrong. Although he does hate fuss. And he's quite stubborn. And he hates to appear weak.'   
Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – Toshiya could have just throttled Shinya.   
' _Yeah_ , but,' he said forcefully, 'That's just what I mean. What if he's really unwell? Did – did you ever have to watch that video in school, in your citizenship class? The on where the old lady is ill, and she chokes on her own vomit and she would have died if that girl hadn't put her in the recovery position?'  
Shinya cocked his head, like a dog catching an unfamiliar scent.   
'No,' he replied, 'But I saw one where an old man slipped and broke his leg, and a group of boy scouts heard him yelling and raised the alarm.'  
'Yeah, but—'  
'A community awareness sort of thing.'   
'Yeah, so maybe somebody should check on him.'  
'He's not an old person, though.'   
'Yeah, but anyone can choke.'   
'All those videos were about old people.'  
They seemed to be stuck. And Toshiya didn't really know what he was getting at, anyway: it wasn't as if Kaoru had called in sick because he'd choked to death or was trapped inside his home and starving to death, so what was the big deal?   
Still: 'I can stop in this evening,' Toshiya found himself forging on painfully, 'And see if he's all right.'   
'Oh. Do you know first aid?'  
'Oh. Um. Well, no, but...'  
Shinya tucked his hair behind his ear: a self-contained, pretty sort of gesture.   
'I do,' he said mellowly. 'I can demonstrate CPR before you go, if you want. It's fairly simple.'   
Toshiya sent him a narrow look: he was reasonably sure that, despite the very level cadence of Shinya's voice and the way he was holding his head, he was being sarcastic.   
'I think I'll be all right,' he said sourly.   
'Everyone should know it, really,' Shinya suggested vacantly. He took another sip of his tea. He'd been heading somewhere with purpose when Toshiya had stopped him; now, he seemed to have lost steam. He sat down delicately next to Toshiya on the sofa, not really looking at him but sort of relating to him, nonetheless; his body language was careful, aware. Like a dog, Toshiya couldn't help but thinking. Like a dog that wanted to be petted but didn't want to be upfront about it. He waited, legs crossed uncomfortably; everything below his waist still felt painfully sensitive, as though he had too many nerve endings.  
'I've had a song in my head all day,' Shinya said conversationally. 'Isn't that annoying? There was an instrumental version playing in the convenience store I went to this morning.'  
'Yeah?'  
'Mm.  _Yesterday Once More_ . You know, that—'  
'The Carpenters, right.' He hummed a bit gamely, and Shinya joined in, and they smiled at each other.   
'Not very metal, I know.'  
'Well, I won't tell the others.'   
Shinya gave a laugh that was more of a slightly enthusiastic exhalation than anything else. He left a polite pause.  
'So how have things been?'  
Something about his ultra-polite tone made it clear what he was talking about, and Toshiya shrugged.  
'Fine. I guess. I mean – it hasn't come up again, has it? Kyo hasn't...'   
He let his voice drift away, partially out of annoyance; he didn't want to have this conversation. He snuck a quick look at Shinya, but the drummer just nodded serenely and tilted his head sympathetically to the side. He sat so primly; so prissily, with one leg crossed delicately over the other and his posture faultless. Toshiya knew Shinya wasn't gay, but he found himself sort of wishing that he was: not because he was attracted to him, but just to stop the two lives he was living from being so fucking  _separate_ . Day Toshiya. Night Toshiya   
If they passed each other in the street, they wouldn't have known each other. They wouldn't have even looked twice.   
'I didn't think it would,' Shinya was saying thoughtfully, 'But I worried.'   
'Why do you stick so close to him?' Toshiya asked curiously, 'If it bothers you, I mean?'   
In strange, almost comical synch, both of their dark sets of eyes swivelled to the mixing desk where Kyo sat, encased with glass and flooded with the cold blue-white light of his computer screen. He looked like a specimen in an aquarium.   
'We've been friends for a very long time,' Shinya said slowly. 'I don't really know if...'   
Uncharacteristically, he let his sentence trail. 'I don't know if his heart is really in it,' he finished at last.   
'In – if his heart's into the  _band_ , you mean?' Toshiya asked sharply, surprised by the bolt of sick fear that had gone through him.  
'No, he's very into the band. Into you, I mean. Getting at you.' Shinya paused, pressing his lips together.   
Toshiya was quiet for a moment, because he didn't really know what to say.  
'Hell of a joke to play,' he mumbled at last, and almost eagerly Shinya shook his head.   
'Oh no, not a joke.'   
'I don't understand.'   
'Yeah.' For a brief moment, the drummer allowed himself to look incredibly frustrated, but then he simply shook his head.   
'I don't think I do, either.' 

It was just approaching eight o'clock by the time Toshiya left the studio that evening, and the sky was already lit with the noxious orange colour that passed for night-time in the city. A thin, needling sort of rain had started up, and the wind was blowing in a gusty, schizophrenic kind of way that kept forcing Toshiya's umbrella inside-out; finally, he gave up on it and simply huddled into the collar of his jacket for protection, beating a hasty path to the mouth of the nearest subway station. He didn't really feel like waiting for the bus that night. Anyway, the train from Fukaebashi would take him all the way to Honmachi, after which he could change trains and end up in Hanazonocho – practically on his doorstep. And he could always get off a little earlier – in Namba, say – and see how Kaoru was feeling.   
If he wanted to.  
The doors folded shut on him silently and enclosed him in a densely-packed muddle with the late commuters, hanging onto a strap that hung from the ceiling. The carriage was full but mostly quiet, save for the sounds of the train rocking along its tracks and the throb of the engines; all around him people were reading newspapers, plugged into headphones or else staring listlessly off into space. It was kind of depressing, Toshiya thought. In their dark business dress, bobbing in line along with the train, the commuters looked like a whole flock of magpies, and Toshiya was reminded of how narrowly he'd avoided such a life. How Kaoru, maddeningly enough, had been the one to save him from it.  
Maybe for that reason, he found himself getting off the train early and emerging into the unfamiliar crush of Namba station. He felt temporarily disoriented; when he finally found his way out into the night air he walked a few streets in the wrong direction before, mercifully, spotting a sign for the Edion Arena and realising he was going the wrong way.   
Well: that, and he was tired. It had been a strange, quiet, oppressive sort of day, stuck in the studio with Kyo's icy silence and just Shinya as a buffer, the drummer's warmth too weak to thaw out the frozen places that existed between them, and he wanted to see Kaoru just for his...well, just for his _being_ there. His presence, infuriating as it often was, was still – reassuring, somehow. When Kaoru was there, things just went less _wrong_.  
Anyway. Even heading in the right direction, he only sort of knew the way to Kaoru's place: not well enough to take any shortcuts or detours. He travelled swiftly and purposefully, counting the blocks in his head as he walked, and when he arrived at Kaoru's building it was getting towards nine o'clock and he'd only taken one more wrong turn, down a back alley that had turned out to be a dead end. Kaoru lived on the fifth floor. There was an elevator – a new development; last time Toshiya had been there, it'd been out of order – which was clean but dim and disconcertingly rattly, and made Toshiya nervous: when it got to Kaoru's floor he found himself almost leaping through the doors. At Kaoru's front door he knocked once, firmly. He waited and then knocked again, more gently.  
He felt suddenly guilty; selfish, really. He knew enough about Kaoru to know that he would rather be left alone at the best of times, but when he was sick and feeling weak, and vulnerable? Maybe he was hiding inside, waiting for Toshiya to do the decent thing and fuck off home.   
Then he reminded himself that Kaoru had never, ever taken a day off before. And what if it was something really serious, really wrong, and he needed help?  
But he knew in his heart that he was only trying to rationalise his own selfishness; his need to fill his head with Kaoru so that his weird, tense day would get crushed out of the scene. And he shut his eyes for a moment and turned to go, but he thought he caught the sound of light footsteps from beyond the door, and then the lock was clicking and the door was opening on a chain, and then Kaoru's face was there looking wan and tired through the four-inch gap that the chain allowed.   
'Toshiya,' he said. His voice sounded surprised but also different, Toshiya thought: rough, and tired. 'What are you doing here?' he asked.   
Too late, Toshiya realised that he should have brought something: soup, or rice, or medicine. They studied each other uneasily through the doorway, and Toshiya thought that Kaoru _looked_ sick: he was pale and his hair was sticking up all at odd angles like he'd been raking his hands through it, and there were deep, dark circles under his eyes. His lips were chapped, like he'd been rubbing at them.   
'I came to see how you were feeling,' he said a little lamely. 'How are you?'  
'I'm all right,' Kaoru said quietly. 'Thanks. It's just a cold.' He paused. 'Hang on.'  
The door closed abruptly in Toshiya's face and there was a rattling as Kaoru struggled with the chain. When he reappeared, Toshiya saw that he was dressed in pyjama pants and a T-shirt, and although his hair had been looking dishevelled, it now looked as if he'd made a hasty effort to smooth it down.  
'Hi,' he said in a nervous-sounding voice. 'Do you want to come in?'  
'Sure. If that's okay. Thanks.'   
'Of course it's okay.'   
'Well, I just thought – if you were asleep or in bed, or something—'  
'Oh. No.'   
By this time they were standing awkwardly in the living room with its little strip of kitchen in the corner, and Kaoru nodded towards the sofa, where his acoustic guitar was propped carefully against the cushions. 'I was just...'  
'You shouldn't be working,' Toshiya admonished gently, smiling. 'You're sick.'   
'No, it's all right. I was just – I don't know. Playing.'   
He sat down heavily on the sofa and pulled his guitar into his lap, looking instantly more comfortable with it in his arms. His fingers glided easily up the instrument's wooden neck, almost lovingly; and it was funny, Toshiya thought, the way all the strange tension between them sort of diminished when Kaoru began to play.

He was sick, and tired, and pale; he was red-eyed, shadowed, harried, but his fingers never faltered. They picked out note after sweet clear note, soft and relaxed, perfectly and effortlessly timed. Weirdly, it was beautiful. A beautiful thing that made the newly bare walls less drab and Kaoru's hunched figure seem younger and more graceful.   
The guitarist stopped and let his hands go limp, looking self-conscious.   
'Wow,' Toshiya said honestly. 'That's so – I didn't know you could play like that. I mean – I only hear you on the electric, usually.'   
'Die's better with the acoustic,' Kaoru replied automatically.  
'That was really great,' Toshiya said softly. His words rang awkwardly, almost lovingly, and he forced himself to put on a more energetic tone of voice: 'You must have had all the girls after you, in high school.'   
Kaoru gave an embarrassed sort of snort. 'No way. I could never have played in front of them.'   
'Well...you're really good. I don't think I ever knew – how good you are.'   
Kaoru inclined his head uncomfortably. 'Thank you.'   
'Yeah. You're welcome.'   
Toshiya bounced on the balls of his feet awkwardly. 'Your posters have all gone,' he said. Just making conversation, really, but as he said it he seemed to notice it all over again: those suddenly bald walls, speckled with darker patches where Kaoru's heroes had lived. It felt weird; sad. Like something more than paper had been removed.   
'Yeah.' Kaoru turned his attention back to his guitar, his hair falling over his face and hiding his expression from view, 'I figured I sort of outgrew all that kid stuff. So.'   
'Wow. Yeah. It's just – it's so bare in here.'   
'Yeah, well.' Kaoru shrugged lopsidedly. 'I couldn't keep it all up forever. I'm not a teenager any more.'   
'I guess not.'   
There was a strange pause. On the sofa, Kaoru's outline seemed sort of jagged, like he wasn't really relaxed.   
'How's Kosuke?' he asked out of nowhere.   
'Kosuke? He's fine.' Toshiya twined the longest section of his hair around his fingers and tugged on it anxiously, 'It's going pretty good, I think.'   
Kaoru nodded limply.   
'I'm glad.'   
'Yeah. Thanks.' Toshiya shuffled awkwardly. He'd never seen Kaoru ill before – nothing worse than a hangover, at least – and it looked  _weird_ . He had grown used to seeing their leader, their dauntless leader-sama, as a kind of statue, a rock that stood powerfully and immovably between them and the dismal hordes that threatened to batter at them, to undermine them, to destroy them: failure, regret, addiction. It didn't seem right that he should now be looking so small and so sad and uncomfortable, and Toshiya found himself wanting to touch him – just to put an arm around his shoulders and lean into him – but there was something about Kaoru's body language that just seemed to forbid it. It was as if taking down his superhero posters had caused him to lose his own powers, too.   
Stay away, he seemed to be saying.   
Like a scared animal. Back arched; teeth bared.  
Kaoru put his guitar to the side.   
'Are you seeing anyone right now?' Toshiya asked inanely, trying to fill the silence. Without really looking at him, Kaoru shook his head.  
'Not at the moment,' he said. He sounded tired.   
'Probably wise,' Toshiya tried uneasily, 'We'll be touring again soon, right?'   
'Only for a month. March sixth to April second.' He rubbed a hand over his face. 'You and Kosuke won't get much of a chance to miss each other before you're back, I guess.'   
'Yeah. I suppose not. But then after that we have the foreign leg of the tour, and then...' he let himself trail off; he had no idea what kind of a point he was trying to make. He sighed, sitting down carefully beside Kaoru on the sofa. The guitarist flinched back.   
'Careful,' he mumbled. 'I might be infectious.'  
'Yeah, yeah.' Toshiya twirled a strand of hair around his finger thoughtfully. 'You know, it's not even missing Kosuke that I'm worried about, so much. It's getting jealous.'   
'Jealous.'   
'Yeah. You know. He'll think I'm cheating. I'll think he's cheating. Whatever.'   
'You wouldn't cheat, though.'   
It surprised Toshiya that Kaoru sounded so resolute. He felt a little flattered.   
'No,' he said firmly, 'I wouldn't.'  
'Well, I guess he really likes you,' Kaoru said, his voice soft and frail and weary-sounding, 'So I'm sure it'll be fine.' He gave an odd sort of shrug, pushing his hair back behind his ear self-consciously.   
'Do you like him?'  
'Huh?  
' _Kosuke_ . You – you think he's okay; you like him, right?'   
Kaoru shrugged awkwardly. 'I'm sure he's fine.'   
'Stop saying that.'   
'What?'   
'“I'm sure it'll be fine. I'm sure he's fine.” That's the kind of bullshit you say when you—' Toshiya huffed slightly, forcing himself to be gentler, 'Just say what you really think, will you?'  
'I don't think anything. I don't know him. He seems fine.'  
Kaoru got to his feet tiredly. 'You don't need my approval,' he added, his tone of voice just censorious enough so that Toshiya felt stupid for wanting his blessing in the first place.   
'I suppose not,' he said tightly.   
'I'm – I'm feeling pretty tired. I think I'm going to bed. Sorry.' Kaoru gave a limp shrug. 'Stay over if you want. I can get you some blankets and stuff.'   
'I...' Toshiya wet his lips nervously, 'It's – I don't want to be a bother. I should get home.'  
'Yes. Of course. Sorry.'  
'Kaoru—' Toshiya pressed his lips together.  
'Mm?'   
'Are you...'   
_Are you okay?_ was struggling on his lips, but in the end he just stretched them into a smile and finished up in a brighter-than-normal voice, 'Are you feeling any better?'  
Kaoru smiled, which made him look more exhausted than ever. It was a smile that contorted his face effortfully, a smile that was more like a grimace, as though he was about to cry. It made Toshiya feel anxious to look at it, but Kaoru just said, 'Sure. Much better. Thanks.' 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sharp-eyed readers will note that I now know how long this story is going to be! (Er, kinda.) Having the ending a bit more thoroughly plotted out is making me feel very nostalgic. I need to think about what to write next. 
> 
> As ever, I hope everyone's getting on okay with the current events. If you're bored under lockdown, you might find that showering me with praise fills a few minutes of your time.


	24. Chapter 24

It was finishing time, the bone weariness setting in, twelve days until tour.  
Kaoru tilted his head back and drained the last drops from his water bottle, one hand groping at the back of his neck to pull his ponytail away from his skin. It was hot, and it was late, and he and his band looked sweaty and worn down and frazzled; it had been a difficult day. As Kaoru scanned the studio he could see Die and Shinya edging towards their bags, being as discreet as possible about the fact that they just wanted to pack up and get the hell out of there; to their left Kyo was being somewhat less subtle about it, forcing his notebook into his rucksack with perhaps more aggression than the situation really warranted.   
Looking at them made him feel a strange mixture of emotions: pride, coupled with extreme anxiety. He couldn't see Toshiya anywhere at all. He frowned.  
'Did he leave?' he asked stupidly – he hadn't intended to talk out loud – and Shinya blinked up at him through his sweaty fringe.   
'Toshiya?' he guessed, a careful kind of nonchalance to his tone, 'No. I don't think so.'   
'He's taking a piss,' Die said wisely, 'In the bathroom.'   
'Thanks, Die. I'm aware of where we piss.'   
But his heart had performed some painful kind of gymnastic manoeuvre in his chest – less of a leap, more of a squeeze – and as casually as he could muster he asked, 'Is he planning on carrying on working, then?'   
Pathetic.  
So, so pathetic.  
He told himself, quite firmly, that it wasn't about  _being_ alone with Toshiya exactly, but about  _working_ alone with him. That was how he worked best, after all: he'd seen proof of that time and time again. He just wanted to feel that burst of productivity; that wild spurt of energy. That was all.  
Liar.  
But suppose he was planning on working late; later than they'd already worked? They hadn't really been alone together in weeks. The last time they'd really even  _spoken_ was when Kaoru had been hiding away in his apartment and faking illness like the filthy, despicable coward he was, and Toshiya had come around all gentle concern, never guessing what a large part of the problem he was. Or hopefully not guessing. Please god, not guessing.  
Every night since then Toshiya had either been rushing off to meet somebody or else sunk into some strange, slightly vacant mood that led him to respond to Kaoru's terse questions with vague, annoyingly abstract replies, like some part of him – the  _main_ part of him – was elsewhere, and there was no way to call him back.   
In a poor imitation of nonchalance, Kaoru let the rucksack he'd picked up slip casually off his shoulder, and plastered a frown over his face as he rifled pointlessly through a drift of papers, as though he was looking for something important.  
'Kaoru?'  
Die was standing at the doorway, his torso still inside the studio but one leg already jutting impatiently outward into the stairwell, 'You coming?'  
'Oh, I...' he gestured lamely to the papers he was holding, and Die wrinkled his nose.   
'You're  _not_ still working. It's ten o'clock.  Gone ten. You've been here since nine; nothing's  _that_ urgent.'  
'I don't know how you can say that when we're going on tour in less than two weeks.'   
'Yeah, but we're  _ready_ .'   
'You can always be readier,' Kaoru argued smoothly. 'Anyway, it's no trouble. I'm not tired.'   
But Die's lack of retort was a distraction, and he peered up from the papers in his hand to find Die looking at him strangely, an expression on his face he couldn't quite place.   
'You should get a cat, or something,' the other guitarist said at last, flatly. 'Get a pet so you have to go home and feed it.'   
'Come on,' Shinya said gently, his voice drifting from further down the stairwell; Kaoru saw his long-fingered hand reach up and give a light tug to Die's sleeve, 'Leave Kaoru alone. You don't get to win arguments like this.'   
'Good night, Shinya,' Kaoru said.  
'Good night. Come on, Die.'  
But Die stood there a moment longer before finally shrugging. 'Suit yourself. Night.'   
When the door shut it left him entirely alone; the sudden quiet seemed to ring, softly, in his ears. Perhaps it was because of the way the rooms all interconnected, warren-like, through their soundproof but clear glass walls, but the studio when he was alone inside it seemed somehow emptier than other buildings. The chrome trim on Shinya's studio drums glistened under the lights in a way that came across somehow sinister, and Kaoru found himself noticing just what bizarre things their various musical instruments actually were: the odd, swan-necked shapes of them, sprouting from their leaning points against the walls like strange trees.   
He felt suddenly desperately alone. The relative fanciness of this studio – compared to their previous ones, at least – was not reassuring in the least; he couldn't fight the impression that he might have been some kind of a pharaoh, standing inside his own glistening mausoleum. He had the creeping, prickling feeling of being watched; the smothering sense of being buried. He stared down hard at the papers in his hands, trying to fight it.  
  
It took about five more minutes for Toshiya to reappear. Kaoru had been so busy pretending to be absorbed by the papers he'd been holding that he had, somewhere along the line, ceased to be pretending, and so he did not notice straight away. He only became aware of the other man's presence when Toshiya caught sight of him and jumped, swearing loudly in shock; for a moment or two there was an oddly comical chain reaction of panic, in which the two of them almost simultaneously flinched back at the sight of each other and cried out, and Kaoru's handful of papers burst spectacularly from his fingers and then cascaded elegantly, like feathers, to the ground.   
'Goddamn it,' Toshiya gasped, massaging his chest as though trying to restart his heart, 'You scared the shit out of me. I thought everybody had gone.'   
'Well, obviously that's not the case,' Kaoru snapped, his nerves frayed. He shot the bassist an angry look as he bent down to start picking up the mess he'd made, but did a double-take. 'Did you get changed?'   
Stupid question: Toshiya was standing in front of him in fresh, clean clothes, somewhat nicer than the jeans and T-shirt he'd been wearing to work in all day. He had brushed his hair, too, Kaoru realised – it was getting long again, his hair, he'd need to have it cut – and his lips were slightly red like he'd been kissing somebody, although Kaoru guessed from the faint scent of mint that he'd actually just brushed his teeth.   
'What?' the bassist frowned down at his own body, as though he was only just realising. 'Oh. Yeah.'  
'Why?'  
'Well, I'm...' Toshiya shuffled a little awkwardly, 'I kind of wanted to show Kosuke the studio, so he's going to stop by.'   
Miserably, Kaoru noted how pretty he looked, and how excited. It struck him as deeply unfair that Toshiya should look so beautifully constructed even in loose clothing; all those drapes and folds he camouflaged himself within seemed to call out for Kaoru's palm to flatten them down against the hidden lines of waist and hip.  
He felt suddenly incredibly tired, and sick of himself.  
'Oh.'  
'He's just curious, that's all.'   
Kaoru had the odd sensation of physically yanking a smile into place on his face.   
'That makes sense. If I'd never seen a recording studio before, I'd be curious.'  
'Yeah,' Toshiya said. He sounded relieved, which made it even worse.   
'It's going well with you two, then,' Kaoru said woodenly.  
'I guess it is.' Toshiya smiled at him, the expression coming much more easily to his face than it came to Kaoru's. 'I don't want us to disturb you if you're still working, though. I don't have to bring him up today. We're going to go out, anyway.'   
'Anywhere nice?' Kaoru forced.  
Toshiya's smile brightened nervously. They were going to have drinks, and then they were going to go to the baths. They had been back three times since the first time, near enough once every two weeks. It always left him with the same feeling: an intermingled sense of guilt, exhilaration and tiredness. Like he almost loved it. He wanted a cigarette. He shrugged.  
'Just out for a drink. Somewhere he knows.'  
Kaoru nodded wordlessly. Toshiya began to fiddle with his cuffs.   
'He'll be here soon. D'you mind if—?'  
He left his words hanging in the air, looking at Kaoru in a bright, expectant way that made his chest hurt. The guitarist shrugged, rounding his shoulders in the way he was always trying to remind himself not to do: it made him look smaller.   
'I don't mind if he comes up.'   
Toshiya visibly relaxed, the line of his shoulders smoothing out.   
'Thanks, Kaoru. He'll be happy to see you again. He liked you.'   
Kaoru didn't have any kind of answer to that – he felt like if he opened his mouth an acidic  _yeah, so?_ might fall out – but Toshiya's flighty attention had skipped away from him anyway: the dark sky outside had turned their glass studio into a hall of mirrors, and Toshiya was studying himself worriedly.  
'Should I get my teeth fixed?' he asked suddenly.   
Kaoru frowned. 'Fixed?'   
'Don't play dumb.' He rolled his eyes as he glanced back at Kaoru, 'Remember? A couple of years ago you were calling them my  _jagged fangs_ – ring any bells?'   
'Oh. Yeah. Well. That was a long time ago.'   
'So?'  
'So I was pissed off with you. I didn't...you know,  _mean_ it.'   
'You're always pissed off with me,' Toshiya said, and smiled.   
'Well, you're always pissing me off,' Kaoru retorted comfortably, smiling back.  
'I just—'  
'Knock knock.'  
  
They had oddly opposite reactions. Kaoru jumped again, his shoulders twitching tensely before they lowered, seemed to draw in on themselves as he huddled what was left of himself together; Toshiya turned, grew more alive and expansive, the smile on his face changing, the cant of his hip changing. Having announced himself, Kosuke was lounging in the doorway, his crooked grin sort of a set piece with the little silver piercing in his eyebrow and his dark hair, casually tousled and hanging a little longer over his collar than most men wore it. Everything about him was just unstudied enough to look effortless. He dressed like an art student, in a series of mismatched layers: loose corduroy pants, folded up to show his ankles; the kind of shirt that looked thrifted, from the eighties, but might equally have been a modern pastiche or purchased from a fancy vintage store; a worn waxed cotton jacket like English gentlemen wore, slung over his arm with a grey hoodie still caught up inside it, like he'd pulled them both off as a piece.   
Everything hung on his frame so easily. He had figured out a way of standing in those baggy pants so that they clung to him just enough to be perfect, and for a brief and wildly jealous moment, Kaoru found himself wondering what it would be like to pass through the world so smoothly.   
'My  _man_ ,' Kosuke said in his lazy, attractive drawl – the voice of somebody who had partied all night and woken up, very fresh, at noon – sauntering towards him, 'Long time no see, Kaoru. How are you?'  
Kaoru performed some strange movement, a bow that went wrong. He raked a vexed hand through his hair and gave Kosuke what he hoped was a casual nod.   
'Yeah. Hi. Fine.'   
Liar.   
'How're you?'   
'Can't complain,' Kosuke said easily. He moved forward in such a way that Kaoru, taken aback, thought he wanted to shake hands; reflexively he offered his own palm, only to hear Kosuke's good-natured laugh: he had been heading for Toshiya, of course, to wrap an arm around his waist and kiss his cheek. Kaoru took his hand back foolishly, his cheeks burning; his shoulders stiffened and he stood there stupidly, uselessly, feeling gauche and graceless and angry and, above all, feeling like himself, like  _Kaoru_ . So hatefully like himself.   
'So this is it, huh?' Kosuke asked, peering around interestedly.   
'This is it.'  
Kosuke gave a low whistle. 'Looks pretty legit, rock star. Guess your story checks out.'   
His arm still rested casually around Toshiya's waist. He made it look so easy. When he kissed Toshiya it was on the very corner of his smile, which made him blush.  
'So who else has recorded here? Anybody I'd know of?'   
'Um,  Loudness recorded a few singles here, I think. And—'  
But Kosuke's attention had already landed on the cracked, comfortable leather sofa; he raised his eyes at it. 'I wonder how many people have had sex on that thing.'   
In front of Kaoru, Toshiya struggled. 'You're awful.'   
Wolfish grin. 'I know.'   
A set piece, they turned to Kaoru as one, although it could be that Kosuke's hold on Toshiya's waist was guiding his movements.   
'So how's it going, Kaoru? All ready for the tour?'  
'Near enough.' He pushed some hair back from his face awkwardly. He had sweated whilst he was working, and his damp hair had dried awkwardly.  
'I keep asking Toshiya to introduce me to you guys, but he's too ashamed of me.'   
'That's not it,' Toshiya argued, but softly.   
'I don't think I ever asked what you do,' Kaoru said.  
'Me? I'm a graphic designer.'  
'That must be interesting.'  
'Oh, it's not,' Kosuke said cheerfully. 'I work for a company, not freelance, and mostly it's just manipulating corporate logos into badges and keyrings and shit, or tweaking them so that they can go nicely on a coffee cup or T-shirt. Pretty boring work, but it's easy, or else I'm just good at it. Plus—' he lowered his voice a little, conspiratorially, his eyes glinting, 'The owner's a total lush, so he always closes up at five so he can go and get tanked. Leaves me plenty of time for my extra curriculars.'  
'Oh. You have a hobby, or something?'  
' _Dating_ is my hobby. Got to keep everybody happy; it takes up all my time.'  
'Ha ha,' Kaoru said politely, confused. Toshiya didn't laugh, though. In fact, Kaoru saw, his face had completely stiffened: its genial smile was locked grimly in place over his lips but it no longer reached his eyes, and a faint line had become noticeable between his eyebrows. Kaoru hesitated.  
'I'm not sure I get you.'  
'Excuse me,' Toshiya said abruptly. At some point he must have worked his way free of Kosuke's hold, because he stalked off unencumbered in the direction of the bathroom and disappeared behind the frosted glass door, leaving both men gazing after him: Kosuke bemused, Kaoru frowning.  
'Bad day?' Kosuke asked delicately. 'I heard your singer can be a bit...'  
'Oh. No. I mean – tour stress, maybe. I don't know.'   
'Yeah? Nerves?'  
'Pretty much. Sure. He always gets freaked when we're going to Nagano.'   
'Nagano, huh? Why?'   
'What did you mean,' Kaoru said bluntly, 'Dating is your hobby? I don't understand.'   
Kosuke could have been quite taken aback by his tone, but to his credit, he simply arched his eyebrows.   
'It's what it sounds like,' he explained lightly, 'Pretty much all my free time, I spend going on dates.'  
'But I don't...' Kaoru trailed off, and Kosuke grinned at him.   
'Sorry. I don't know how to make it clearer.'  
'I thought you were his boyfriend,' Kaoru said, rather louder than he'd intended. Kosuke blinked at him, looking nonplussed.  
'I am his boyfriend.' His grin widened mischievously, 'Was that not clear?'  
'But you're not dating  _him_ all the time, so—'  
'Oh, no.' Kosuke gave a comfortable shrug, 'Toshiya and I aren't exclusive. It's kind of my thing, I guess. When we first started dating I told him that I was seeing other people, and he thought about it, and he said it was okay. He's free to do the same, of course.'   
'But – so you're  _cheating_ on him.'  
Kosuke shot Kaoru a slightly wry look, and when he spoke again, his voice was – not unfriendly, exactly – but slightly more restrained; more guarded.   
'No, I'm not cheating on him, actually. I'm not lying to him, or betraying him. He knows what's going on.'   
'But he wouldn't do that,' Kaoru said aggressively. 'There's no way he would go for that. He needs—' he stifled himself; it had been on the tip of his tongue to say  _so much love, he needs so much love, _ but he pulled himself tightly inward and substituted, in stiff tones, 'Someone stable. Dependable, I mean. Our lives are so unpredictable.'  
Irritatingly unwounded, Kosuke just shrugged. 'Maybe you don't really know what he needs.'   
Kaoru swallowed tightly. His throat felt as though something was stuck in it.   
'He's too good for you,' he said quietly.  
'Look. I know it's not conventional, but Toshiya's happy. We're having fun. What's wrong with that?'  
But he had changed: he had lost his lightness and his warmth. His demeanour, so easy and charming, had ossified somehow. 'He is a grown up, you know,' he added. 'He can make his own decisions.'  
'But why do you do it?'  
'God,' Kosuke laughed a little exasperatedly, 'I do it because I  _like_ it; is that all right with you? I do it because it  _works_ . Because maybe the world would be less  _wound up_ if more people would try it.'  
'But—' Kaoru cut himself off frustratedly, raking an agitated hand through his hair, knotty from where he'd sweated and cooled. He couldn't say what he really wanted to say:  _but you have him. _   
_How could you possibly want anybody else when you have _ him _?  
_ Far, far too dangerous to say that.   
He looked away; looked down at the floor. Gritted his teeth against the urge to say it, rising inside of him like vomit. They were quiet, both of them. Kosuke pretended to take in the view from the windows, although there was not much to see. Kaoru kept his gaze down at his feet. They were still ignoring each other when, looking a little pinched, Toshiya reappeared. There was a brave smile on his face, not entirely convincing. It was like a crack in a wall that had just been papered over and left to deepen and shake.   
'Ready to go?' he asked, impressively breezy.   
'Sure. Sure, let's go. Nice to see you again, Kaoru.'   
'Kaoru?' Toshiya asked carefully, 'Are you leaving now?'  
'I have work to do.'   
'You should go home,' Toshiya said quietly, 'It's late – you've been here so long—'  
'We're touring in less than two weeks. It needs to be done.'   
Toshiya fidgeted. 'Do you need me to stay?'  
'You?' Kaoru said dismissively. 'Of course not.' He could feel the beginnings of a headache uncoiling behind his eyes and thumping queasily in his temples; he wanted them to get out and go away. He felt so jealous, so torn up and angry, that he was sick with it.  
'You'll make yourself ill if you work too hard,' Toshiya said uncertainly, a pleading note to his voice, and Kaoru felt his frayed nerves come close to snapping inside him.   
'Please,' he said shortly, 'Just go. I've got a lot to do and – you're in the way.'   
'C'mon,' Kosuke said, wrapping his arm back around Toshiya's waist, 'He's right; we're just underfoot at the moment. Let's go.'   
And they did leave, then. And Kaoru stood alone in the middle of the room, the fluorescent lights shining on his hair where his head was bowed.   
Silent, he hated. Hated Kosuke; hated them both, really, but he was aware that his fresh anger at Toshiya was a pathetic thing, stunted, a poor substitution for the truth. It was his high school anger, repeating in him like a bad nightmare; the same anger he'd felt towards the girls who sneered at him, the boys who jostled him and laughed over him and looked through him. It was an anger that turned inward and raged against his own face and body, his quiet, reasonable voice, his uptight thoughts and movements and the tension he saw looking back at him from his own eyes in the mirror. Stunted, and hopeless. Like a fox in a trap, chewing its own leg off.   
What he resented the most was his own jealousy; the feeling like Toshiya was supposed to be his.   
It disgusted him. And he knew what every person like him should come through high school knowing: that people like Toshiya didn't belong with people like him, not now and not ever. It simply wasn't the way things worked.   
Still,  _you keep talking to him like that_ , a voice inside Kaoru's head said mockingly,  _and he's never going to look at you_ .   
It was a bothersome, headachy thought. It made him feel sicker. He pushed it away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, an early update! I'm currently writing chapter 39, so I figured it was _safe enough_ to start putting this story up at a faster clip. What do you guys think; is a chapter every two days better, or should I stick to one every three days? I don't want to start overwhelming everyone with my sad sad words.


	25. Chapter 25

In the end Toshiya and Kosuke didn't go to the baths. Toshiya said he had a headache, which Kosuke accepted without any of his expected quips about the healing effects of an orgasm or two; he was in a strange sort of mood, Toshiya thought, quiet and pensive, which wasn't like him. It was unnerving. His speed and his chatter, his slapdash impulsiveness: that was what Toshiya liked about him. He liked that his own thoughts seemed quieter around Kosuke; he liked not having time to second-guess. To think.   
Instead of the baths they took a taxi back to Toshiya's apartment. It stunned Toshiya how much he suddenly disliked the place. He opened a bottle of wine.   
'As soon as we're back from tour, I'm moving,' he said decisively.   
'God, I _hate_ moving. All that packing and unpacking, dust everywhere, renting a van and then having to figure out where to park it...'  
'I'll hire movers.'  
'As if.'  
'As if?'  
'As if you'd ever let anyone touch those precious guitars of yours,' Kosuke scoffed. He reached out for the wine Toshiya was offering; he didn't have any crystal so he'd poured it into two handleless teacups. Toshiya held his like it was full of tea, too, wrapping both hands around it as though it could warm him.   
'Well once you're done moving,' Kosuke said gamely, 'I know what I'm getting you for a house warming present: wine glasses. Proper ones. Rock star.'   
They sat a little awkwardly around Toshiya's low table. Toshiya knew he should be making an effort to be a better host – put on a CD, or offer to get Kosuke a cushion to kneel on – but he just couldn't seem to find the will. Actually, he felt sort of stiff, like he couldn't move too well; as if some part of him was petrifying.   
Kosuke eyed Toshiya and gave him a neutral sort of smile. 'You're mad at me,' he said.   
'Yeah.' Toshiya looked down at the tabletop. He fantasized spilling his wine over it. He knew logically that it would simply make a puddle, but he couldn't seem to fight the impression that it might flow along the lines of the wood grain, like it could rediscover that initial wound. Every piece of wooden furniture represented the point where, for some unfortunate tree, it all went wrong. He really did have a headache; it made an audible pulsing noise in his ears. 'You shouldn't have said that to Kaoru.'  
'Toshiya,' Kosuke said soothingly, 'C'mon. It's not such a big deal.'  
'No, it _is_ a big deal. To me it is.'   
Toshiya paused. His voice had taken on a hardness that surprised him; he took a sip of his drink. 'I asked you not to tell any of them, and you said you wouldn't,' he said in more level tones.  
'I know. I know, I did, and – you're right. I'm sorry. I really am, and I didn't – it just slipped out, you know?'  
He sat up on his knees and crawled around the table to Toshiya's side, his arms slipping comfortingly around Toshiya's shoulders as he drew their bodies together, chest to back. They didn't have such a height difference, sitting down. Kosuke nestled his chin on Toshiya's shoulder, like he'd grown another head.   
'I'm really sorry,' he repeated. 'It won't happen again. And at least it was only Kaoru, right? He doesn't exactly strike me as the gossipy type; half the time he barely seems able to string two words together.'  
'You don't know him,' Toshiya said a little sharply, and Kosuke gave him a gentle squeeze.  
'But you see my point, right? It's not like I told your singer or that other guitarist or anything.'   
Toshiya closed his eyes. 'Yeah,' he said dully. 'I guess.'   
It was true, he knew, that Kaoru wouldn't tell anybody – he was far too rigidly principled for that; far too concerned with The Way Things Ought To Be – but really, the others knowing felt like a drop in the ocean compared to the catastrophe of Kaoru knowing. He played through it miserably in his head: Die would be intrigued, amused; Shinya would be quietly wondering; Kyo already thought he was a degenerate.   
It was only Kaoru who would outright disapprove.   
And the thought of Kaoru knowing and thinking less of him made him feel as if he'd swallowed a big, dry, bitter pill that had stuck in his throat.  
'You like him.'   
Kosuke's voice seemed to be coming at him from a great distance away. He tried to force himself to concentrate.  
'I'm sorry, what?'  
'C'mon, you heard.'   
'No, I was really – I was just – sorry.'  
From the way Kosuke's head was nestled against his neck and jaw, he felt it rather than saw it when the other man rolled his eyes.  
'Little dreamer,' he said, not entirely kindly. 'I said that you _like_ him. Don't you.'  
'Like – who?'   
'_Kaoru_.'  
Toshiya suddenly felt very hot. Kosuke's arms around his chest felt restrictive.  
'Don't be stupid,' he mumbled. 'Kaoru's straight.'   
'Oh yeah, I forgot, nobody _ever_ wound up with a crush on a straight boy.'   
'You're being ridiculous.'  
Kosuke laughed and bit down very lightly where Toshiya's shoulder met his neck. 'Come on. I'm not as dumb as I look, you know. You're _crazy_ about him.'   
'_You're_ crazy.'   
He felt Kosuke's smile against his skin. The other man's hand brushed over where Toshiya's heart was tapping anxiously at his ribs and went lower, circling around his naval, cupping his hip and then coming to rest between his legs, squeezing lightly.  
'You don't have to be ashamed,' Kosuke said, feeling his boyfriend's cheek starting to warm against his own, 'This is the whole point. I don't want to be the only for you; don't you want lovers, too? Can't you imagine him being one of them?'  
Shifting somehow closer, rocking his body against Toshiya's gently, he unzipped the younger man's jeans and pushed his hand inside.  
'I can see the appeal,' he said softly. 'He's cute, isn't he?'   
'No,' Toshiya said, but his voice sounded a little breathier than was normal. The tip of Kosuke's finger teased his dick through his underwear, and he squirmed where he sat.  
'Well _I_ think he's cute.' Kosuke's voice was warm in his ear. 'You know what I like?'  
Toshiya shifted, pushing his hips up a little against the hand on his dick; in response, Kosuke slid it beneath the waist of his underwear. Toshiya's cock was hot, starting to push against his palm, but Kosuke took his time with it; he stroked it once, twice, slowly; he rubbed his thumb over its head, tracing its shape. Toshiya swallowed and his throat rippled. A pulse throbbed there, beautifully.  
'I like his arms,' Kosuke whispered, 'His hands. They're so delicate. So deliberate. Careful. I think you watch him play guitar and imagine what his fingers would feel like inside you, two or three of them at once.'  
'Stop,' Toshiya breathed, but he arched upwards.  
'I think you want to suck him off, too, don't you?' His lips brushed the skin below Toshiya's ear, laying a gentle kiss there as he began to stroke Toshiya's cock faster, 'I've had that type of guy, you know. Always so in control, but once you're on your knees, you can make them lose it for you. D'you think about that? He'd try to be quiet, but he'd end up saying your name.'  
He laughed softly, feeling Toshiya's dick jerk against his palm.  
'It's not even out of the question, you know. It never is. Get him drunk and lean up against him like you do, and put your hand where mine is; see if he's straight enough to say no when he's horny from travelling for three weeks with no time to fuck, no time to jerk off unless he's doing it in the bed right next to you, trying not to wake you up, biting down on the pillow so he won't make any noise and trying not to get cum on the sheets, trying not to look at you while he does it, but he would. He wouldn't be able to help himself. He'd think about you fucking me and fucking other people, and when you touched him, he'd let you do it. He'd get so hard right away, and you'd suck him and his hands would be all over you, and he'd be ashamed at first, too ashamed to look at you, so he'd have to fuck you from behind, bend you over a bed or a table or just push you up against a wall and make you – _fuck_, Toshiya, how about some warning?'  
Laughing, Kosuke shook cum from his fingers, his other arm giving a comforting squeeze to Toshiya's waist. 'Feel better now?'  
Toshiya muttered an apology without really paying attention to what he was saying. He felt weird; sensitive and vulnerable, like a crab without a shell. Silently, he pulled his clothes back into place, zipped his jeans and went to put the kettle on. He wanted tea, and for Kosuke to just disappear for a while.   
He thought about how Kaoru would feel about what had just happened, and felt a deep, crushing sort of tiredness. In a kind of fog he retrieved two cups from his cupboard and spooned tea leaves into his pot. He had carried his cup of wine with him, he realised, and on an odd , fatalistic kind of whim he let his fingers relax around it. It was louder than he would have guessed when it shattered. Wine splattered his bare toes.  
'Damn, Toshiya.'  
He didn't answer. He poured the hot water into the teapot and waved Kosuke away when he approached, unusually apprehensive-looking, with a cloth. Walking back to collect the cups after placing the teapot and strainer on the table, he walked straight through the mess he'd made. He tracked blood-coloured footprints back and forth whilst Kosuke settled back to watch him, grim-faced.   
'Look,' he said when Toshiya had sat back down again, his voice soft, 'I know I should expect some kind of _artistic temperament_, and you guys all have to keep your emotions pretty close to the surface, or whatever. But...what's the deal here, exactly?'  
Toshiya gave him a blank look, and Kosuke shrugged in his usual easy manner. 'Humour me.'   
'There's no deal.'   
Kosuke regarded him with an odd expression; part triumph, part resignation. 'You care about him,' he ventured.   
'We're friends. We're – I owe him. I owe Kaoru. All this. My life.' He cleared his throat, 'The life I have, I mean. My good life.'  
'Do you, though?' Kosuke said sceptically.   
'What do you mean?'  
'I mean that this isn't a Dickens novel; you're not some orphan child he took in as his ward. You're his _colleague_.'  
'But it's his band,' Toshiya explained exasperatedly, and Kosuke arched an eyebrow.  
'So he's like your boss.'  
'It's – not that exactly—'  
'But you _want_ him to be your boss,' Kosuke teased.  
'He took a chance on me,' Toshiya said firmly, 'That's all. So I just...I owe him. That's all.'  
Kosuke took a sip of his wine. 'Uh huh.'   
  
They sat mostly in silence, finishing their drinks. Toshiya admired the thoroughness of the mess his wine had made: it was tracked across the floor and had funnelled its way through the grouting of his kitchen tiles; it dripped from the front of his cabinets and was sending up a fruity, heady smell that made him feel drunk.   
He felt not guilty exactly, but sort of – compromised, as though he'd said something he shouldn't have, revealed too much. What could that be, though? He scanned his own words over and over, prodding at them for weaknesses. The tea was good and hot and bracing; he had three cups whilst Kosuke sipped thoughtfully at his wine.   
At long last the other man put his cup down and got to his feet, stretching a little awkwardly. He bent down on Toshiya's side of the table and kissed him carefully on the cheek. Something about him, some keychain or necklace maybe worn under his clothes, jingled softly; he smelled clean, like lemons. There was a quality to the kiss that told Toshiya what it really was; its gentleness, its respectability. It was a kiss goodbye.   
'This only works,' Kosuke explained calmly, 'Because I care about all of you, just the same. I date a lot of people, but that doesn't mean I'm not fussy. It takes a really special person, you know?'   
Toshiya's face felt stiff, like a cast.   
'It works best that way because nobody gets hurt. Nobody gets jealous.'  
'Who's jealous?' Toshiya demanded weakly, and Kosuke gave him a rueful smile.   
'You're in love with him.'  
'He's just a _friend_.'  
'I know. Hey, so what? You love him all the same.'   
'Kosuke,' Toshiya blurted, scrambling to his feet, 'Look – I don't – just wait a minute, will you? Wait—'  
'Come on, Toshiya. This isn't working for you, and it never was.' He smiled amiably, showing off his cute little crooked teeth in a way that felt very unfair, 'For a rock star, you're pretty damn square, okay? I saw your face when I let slip to Kaoru; I'm not an idiot. I guess if you're going to be with somebody, you have to be the only one. There's nothing wrong with that.'  
'That's not true.'   
'Yes it is.' Kosuke squeezed his hand lightly. 'You want to be special. I don't mean it in a bad way.'   
'But I'm happy with you.'  
Kosuke smiled at him, not his usual sort of smile at all; it was softer, older looking. 'No you're not,' he said gently, 'Not as long as there's somebody else you're always thinking about.'  
'This is nuts,' Toshiya said weakly, 'You're making a decision based on...on a hand job and a glass of wine.'  
'_Cup_ of wine.'   
'Ko, I'm with _you_. I want you. I'll figure it out; the sharing thing. I _promise_.'  
But Kosuke had already let go of his hand, and as Toshiya watched, he shrugged on his coat.  
'I'm gonna miss you,' he said sincerely. A hint of his usual mischievousness flashed into his eyes: 'I'm gonna miss getting taxis instead of the subway, and drinking cocktails instead of beer, and the way you pull your collar up around your face when we pass a certain type of girl, rock star. And I'm going to miss having sex with you a whole lot, so if you'd be up for doing that sometime, you give me a call. I mean it.'   
He ran a hand through his hair, looking suddenly a little uncertain. 'Take care of yourself, okay?' he said. 'You're a pretty nice guy for the business you're in. I think Kaoru's...a bit of a dick. But he's a _good_ dick. You know?'  
He bounced slightly on the balls of his feet. 'Sorry, I suck at goodbyes.'  
'So don't say goodbye,' Toshiya said woodenly.  
Kosuke kissed him, very softly, on the lips. 'Fine. So long, okay?'   
  
With that, he was gone. He left Toshiya standing shell-shocked in the middle of his living room, too stunned to even consider crying; he groped for the forgotten wine bottle, still sat open on the side, and drank down a harsh, sour gulp. He used his bare foot to edge all the shards of broken cup into a mound in the middle of the floor, a white china island in the middle of a bloody sea. It was all the cleaning up he could contemplate doing.   
_My house is dirty_, he thought nonsensically, _so I'll buy a clean one_. The absurdity of it startled a choked, snorting laugh out of him; he caught his reflection in the side of the kettle and stopped short, taken aback. What was _wrong_ with him?  
After that, the tears did come. He wasn't even sure what he was crying for. He hadn't loved Kosuke; hadn't been _in love_ with him – but he had been coming to love, he understood, the idea of him. He had loved having somebody on the other end of the phone; somebody with a life of his own and a whole different set of experiences, who made him laugh and made him cum and held him tight; had loved having someone to eat dinner with, go out with, take risks with. He had loved having someone, or even just a share of someone. He had loved having a time when he wasn't alone.   
He took the bottle of wine to bed with him.  
He was going to kill Kaoru.


	26. Chapter 26

In the days leading up to the tour, Toshiya did a masterful impression of living in a world where Kaoru didn't exist.  
It was strange how easy it was. He could stick to the back of the studio, the part that didn't get any sun, and let words and directives filter down to him gradually, through Die or Shinya. They formed a buffer, a kind of no man's land between Toshiya's own trenches and enemy lines – the searing sunshine where Kaoru and Kyo worked frenetically, sweat on their foreheads and pages of pages of music and lyrics billowing around them like feathers, a burst pillow, their explosive energy made serene by distance.  
It was reasonably productive, and it was peaceful. It was also deadly boring. Toshiya felt his days sort of flattening, like somebody was ironing them down; he worked alone, traded a few words when he broke to eat lunch; he rode home alone on the subway; ate dinner alone; slept alone. He found that he missed Kaoru in a way he hadn't yet allowed himself to miss Kyo. He would catch himself glancing up sometimes, so sure that the other man had just been looking at him, but he was always mistaken. He wondered which one of them he felt more furious with, but reached no conclusions. **  
** But it was easy to ignore them. Easier than anything else. The days passed slowly in the morning and then sped up beyond all reason into the night, and at the end of every working day one or another of them would strike another day off the calendar in menacing red ink, and the tour edged closer and closer until it was on top of them.  
They were all quiet, that last rehearsal day, in varying degrees of calm: Shinya and Kyo tranquil as clouds; Kaoru muttering to himself and running his hands through his hair; Die blundering around in a state nearing shock, jacked up on caffeine and sugar and prone to fits of wide-eyed panic when the sparse conversation edged towards the tour, packing, or venue capacity.  
Toshiya, too, was jittery. Every single item of clothing he owned was stacked up in teetering piles around his bedroom, his suitcase was as yet empty and his stomach felt tangled up in knots. They all left early that day – Kaoru earliest of all, to everybody's private surprise – and it was only when he arrived home himself in the early evening that Toshiya figured out why: the guitarist was waiting for him, leaning against the front of his building like it was the most casual thing in the world. Winter was still in the air, but he was wearing the same jeans and baggy T-shirt that he'd been in all day at the studio. His shoulders were hunched slightly against the wind and he was smoking, but when he saw Toshiya approaching he gutted it and stood up straight.  
He would have been surprised to learn that he didn't look nervous. The bassist had his jacket wrapped tight around his body and a frayed patch at the knee of his jeans, and looking at him gave Kaoru a rush of fondness so strong and inexplicable that he felt almost sick with it.  
Then Toshiya stalked deliberately right past him and jammed his key into the lock on the lobby door, and the fondness receded somewhat. Which would have been a relief, were it not so annoying.  
'Toshiya,' Kaoru said, internally cringing at the sternness of his voice, 'Wait. We need to talk.'  
Toshiya didn't answer him or even stop, but Kaoru managed to catch the lobby door before it closed. Doggedly he followed the bassist up the stairs – their footsteps echoed in a way that sounded, to his ears, competitive – and his reward at the top was Toshiya's split-second of hesitation, keys in hand, in front of his own front door.  
Seizing the opportunity Kaoru said, 'Can I come in?'  
He watched as the bassist's shoulders, defensively drawn upwards, slowly dropped.  
'I don't really care what you do.'  
  
At this time of day, the sun was lost behind the neighbouring buildings and didn't reach Toshiya's living room. It was dark and gloomy and, truthfully, messier than Kaoru had expected: the plants on his windowsill had been allowed to turn brown and brittle-leaved, and there were a quantity of empty liquor bottles littering the kitchen counter tops. Silently the two of them removed their shoes, and because Toshiya didn't offer him slippers Kaoru went hesitantly forward in his socks. There was a dark stain on the tile of his little kitchenette; Kaoru quirked an eyebrow.  
'You stab anybody in here lately?'  
'It's wine. I spilled it; it stained.'  
'Well. I believe you; thousands wouldn't.'  
'Can you get to the point, please? I have a lot of packing to do.'  
Kaoru shrugged, his heart beating anxiously high in his chest. 'I'll help.'  
'No thanks.'  
'I need to talk to you.'  
Toshiya folded his arms determinedly across his chest. 'You've had all day to talk to me.'  
'In private,' Kaoru amended. He watched the way Toshiya's fingers tapped agitatedly at his own upper arms, squeezing his own skin hard enough that his fingernails cut little half moons into his flesh.  
'Well,' Toshiya said finally, 'I don't think I really feel like talking to you right now. So.' He shrugged, an awkward sort of gesture with his arms crossed.  
'Yeah, I know. That's the problem.' He fidgeted where he stood, wanting another cigarette already. 'You've been avoiding me all week. I know you're mad at me.'  
'Well deduced,' Toshiya said sourly.  
'Look,' Kaoru said a little snappishly – the bassist's sullenness was trying his temper – 'We can't go on tour like this, and you know it. So I was kind of hoping that whatever you're sulking about, you could get it out of your system now.'  
'Oh, so now you're scheduling our fights? Very organised of you.'  
'I do try,' Kaoru said dryly.  
In his dreary little kitchenette, Toshiya lingered, his indecision palpable. He wasn't looking at Kaoru; he was looking down at the floor instead, at the blood-coloured stain. Very carefully, he traced around its outline with his toes.  
'Fine,' he said finally. Kaoru let out a breath he'd only half-consciously been holding.  
'Thank you.'  
Toshiya ignored that. 'Let's just pack,' he said shortly.  
  
His bedroom, he had to admit, had seen better days. Since he'd left his apartment that morning, the piles of clothing seemed to have multiplied, and a few had toppled under their own weight; his bedding was still laid out on the floor, the sheets tangled like he'd been fighting with somebody, and his closet doors stood widely open to advertise the emptiness within. Well: none of his concern. He left Kaoru to pick through the mess and went back into the living area to put a CD on. His hands were trembling, he noticed as he grappled with his stereo. Out of a morbid kind of spite, he chose X Japan's Blue Blood even though he had to dig halfway down through the stack for it (his CDs weren't in any kind of order, a fact he earmarked to offend Kaoru with later). The celebratory sound of the opening track felt nicely ironic, and acting on a whim, he went and collected two tumblers from his kitchen cupboard and tucked a bottle of Suntory Old under his arm. He debated bringing in ice cubes or water, like a proper host, but decided against it. He figured he'd exceed expectations simply by bringing in two glasses.  
In the bedroom, he could hear Kaoru rustling around already. He didn't say anything to him: simply walked back in and poured the drinks, giving them both a generous shot. He loved the rich, gulping sound of whiskey as it poured. It made him feel the most incredible thirst.  
Kaoru was standing with his legs braced shoulder-width apart and his hands on his hips, like a king surveying his newest and most lawless domain; his keen eyes took in the explosion of clothing with mild interest.  
'How many suitcases are you bringing?'  
Helpfully, Toshiya just shrugged. He held out one of the glasses to Kaoru until politeness dictated that the guitarist couldn't ignore it any longer, and had to take hold of it.  
'Thanks,' he said absently. He pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. 'Okay. Let's approach this logically. We can split what you need into three basic categories: clothes, toiletries, and entertainment. Obviously the clothing is top priority, so we can start with that. I've scheduled in two two-day stays at hotels with a laundry service, so that should take the pressure off a little; even so, I'd say you'll want enough underwear for about—'  
Silently, having downed his drink, Toshiya stooped down, picked up as large an armful of boxer briefs and shorts as he could manage, and flung them artlessly at Kaoru's face. Underwear in black, grey, blue drifted over the guitarist's shoulders and collected on the floor like snow. Calmly, Kaoru plucked a pair of briefs from the top of his head and dropped them onto the floor with the rest. He took a tight-lipped sip of his drink and then got to his knees and began neatly stacking and folding the collection of underwear, smoothing them into two very tidy piles. A muscle was working away in his jaw, but otherwise he was the picture of calm.  
Asshole.  
'I'd say to bring this many,' he said in a very even voice, indicating one of the piles, 'But we won't pack those yet; you'll want them close to the top. Same with T-shirts. Let's put in some warm clothes, too. You always get cold on the bus.'  
His tone of voice dipped a little there, indicating that he might consider this some kind of significant personal fault; still, Toshiya had to admire the steadiness of his voice, even as he groped a little shakily for the rest of his drink and threw it down his throat. For something to do, Toshiya refilled both their glasses. He liked the way strong drink went to his stomach and head both at once; liked the way it burned in his throat and made his limbs feel loose and powerful and his spirit reckless.  
He drank more as he watched Kaoru sort his piles of clothing into categories: pants, T-shirts, sweaters, jackets, scarves, socks, jewellery; all the little trappings of Toshiya's life, whirling around him like confetti. Or rather not the trappings of his life, but the props; all the little bits of costume that enabled him to play his rock star part. He refilled Kaoru's glass and, without consultation, the older man retrieved a suitcase from where Toshiya stored them on top of his closet and began to pack it full, deftly folding T-shirts and fitting shoes together neatly heel to toe, like a yin and yang. Gradually the chaos in the room began to sort itself into order. Before too long, Kaoru was zipping up the first suitcase with a small, satisfied kind of flourish, and he sat back against the wall with his drink. It was his fifth by now; his cheeks were a little red.  
'So,' he said, as if there'd been no pause in their conversation, 'Why are you mad at me?'  
His voice was steady and deep. Toshiya loved the way he spoke so quietly; how he could sound so powerful without shouting. He was getting a little tipsy, he realised. He gave a short, vicious shrug.  
'You know why.'  
'I promise you, I don't.'  
Pause. Toshiya deliberated, his mouth set into a resolute scowl.  
'You talked to Kosuke.'  
'Not a crime.'  
'No – you said – things. About me.'  
'Things?' Kaoru probed gently, and Toshiya felt his cheeks flare warm.  
'You made him leave,' he mumbled.  
'I – _what_? Leave?'  
Toshiya took a sip of his drink, rather than watch Kaoru connect the dots. It tasted like dead water.  
'Oh,' Kaoru said softly. He got up on his knees like he was going to move closer from where he sat on the opposite side of the room, but seemed to think better of it and simply hovered there uncertainly. 'I'm – wow. I'm so sorry you two broke up.'  
'No you're not.'  
Kaoru's heart gave a painful lurch. 'Pardon?'  
'I said, no you're _not_ . You hated him right from the beginning, and then I – it was _five minutes_. I left you alone with him for _five minutes_, and you blew it for me. I just – I just don't understand. Why would you do that?'  
'I didn't say anything to him!'  
'You don't have to,' Toshiya said clearly, his teeth bitterly clenched, 'You _never_ have to; you say it all with the way you are. You couldn't even pretend that you approved, could you? And why would you, anyway? It's not like he made me _happy_, or anything. It's not like I was really enjoying feeling less _lonely_, or like someone _cared_ about me.'  
'Toshiya—'  
'Asshole.'  
Their glasses were empty. Kaoru approached Toshiya very warily, like he was a wild animal poised to bite, and poured each of them a refill. For some reason neither of them could explain, they clinked glasses before taking a sip.  
'You're right,' Kaoru said at last, awkwardly. 'I didn't like him. I didn't approve, and I thought you could do better. But—' he waved off Toshiya's interruption; he could see it coming a mile off, 'But that's no reason for him to break up with you. You don't need my approval. I'm not your father.'  
'But he – you only disapproved because we were dating other people as well.'  
Kaoru looked at him. 'You were too?' he asked curiously, and Toshiya's neck flushed a little as he lowered his gaze.  
'Admit it,' he said lowly, ignoring the question, 'That's why.'  
Kaoru hesitated. 'Yes.'  
'Did you ever think that maybe I liked that? That maybe I thought it was...fun, and sexy, and exciting?'  
_I could tell from your face that you didn't_, Kaoru almost said, but he bit it back. The truth was, there was no answer he could find to Toshiya's question that wasn't hopelessly incriminating; no possible answer except the almost irresistible _but he had _ you_, how could he possibly want anyone else when he had _ you_?  
Don't you see what an idiot that made him; what a huge defect that was?_  
_How could anybody ever be good enough for you?_  
  
'I was thinking of the band,' Kaoru said at last, his throat aching tightly around his lie. 'I thought – I know you don't want to hear this, but we have to be careful, _so_ careful, with you. If it gets out – you know...' he trailed off a little miserably. 'When you're dating one person, that's a risk. Every person in your life who knows is a risk, and the more you widen that circle...' he gestured with his hands, a perfect sphere slowly growing outward. 'If you knew about the others, what's to say the others didn't know about you? How could you stop word from getting out, that way? It's just not...safe. For us.'  
He was confusing himself; he felt drunk. Toshiya was silent, his face somehow closed-off looking. The CD had finished and without excusing himself, he stood up to go and change it over. Absently, he simply took the topmost album off the pile, which was Kate Bush's Hounds of Love. After X Japan, it didn't go. Well. Whatever. When he went back into the bedroom Kaoru was studying his face so closely that he felt like he was onstage and under a spotlight already. He sat down closer to him than he needed to. He smelled good. Toshiya topped up their glasses.  
'I am sorry,' Kaoru said softly, 'That this happened. I never wanted to break you up, or make you unhappy. I mean that.'  
Toshiya shifted uncomfortably. 'I know,' he said in a small voice.  
'Are you...okay about it? The breakup, I mean?'  
'Sure. I guess. It's just...' he twisted his fingers a little agitatedly, 'Our lives are so _weird_. I don't mean – I _love_ it, what we do, making music. I really do. I wouldn't change it; I don't even know what else I would do, but I – it's _lonely_ . I didn't ever imagine that it'd be lonely.'  
'Ah,' Kaoru said quietly. 'Yeah. It is.'  
'But he didn't _care_ about any of that, the rock star stuff. He wasn't even that into music, and I'd figured that would be a deal breaker but instead it felt... _great_. Just being Toshiya, and not having to be anything else. More than him being good-looking, or charming, or funny, that was what I liked about him. That was why he was special.'  
'You're just Toshiya to us, too,' Kaoru tried lamely, and Toshiya gave a derisive snort.  
'Sure. Once you start sleeping with me, it'll be perfect.'  
Kaoru choked on his drink, inhaling half of it, and broke out into a loud, sputtering coughing fit; he doubled over and felt Toshiya's body press against him, the bassist sniggering lowly, bringing up a hand to hit him helpfully between the shoulder blades. Kaoru closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the world tilted sharply. It was good, very good, to hear him laugh and be near to him.  
'We should get the rest of the packing done,' he said, the words coming out a little thick and bungled. Experimentally he closed his eyes again, and when he opened them the earth shifted itself uneasily back into place.  
'What? You're done, aren't you?'  
'You still need – your toiletries and stuff. And music...books or whatever...'  
Toshiya gave an impatient huff. 'I'll do that tomorrow. Have a little more with me.'  
'I'm already pretty...you have a drinking problem,' Kaoru slurred, but he accepted a refill and clinked his glass against Toshiya's solemnly. 'Cheers. So you aren't angry with me any more?'  
Toshiya tipped his head back as far against the wall as it would go, studying the faint whorling pattern in the ceiling plaster above him.  
'I guess I didn't really have any reason to be mad at you,' he said quietly, sipping at his drink – a difficult task, his head being at the angle it was. 'I just wanted to blame somebody. Somebody who wasn't me.' He let his head fall to the side and gave Kaoru a rueful smile. 'You fit the part.'  
'Toshiya. It's not your fault.'  
'Oh, I love this song. “His little heart, it beat so fast, and I'm ashamed of running away...”'  
'You didn't do anything wrong.'  
Toshiya snorted again. 'Come on, how can you say that? You get pissed off at me a thousand times a day. You'd dump me after about twenty minutes.'  
He eased himself into a more normal position, stretched, and drained his glass. Kaoru wasn't quite done with his, but Toshiya topped them both up anyway. It was only polite.  
'You're getting me so drunk,' the guitarist protested weakly.  
'Yeah. I'm getting me so drunk, too.'  
They lapsed back into a companionable silence, both leaning against the same wall, their shoulders touching, legs stretched out in front of them, Toshiya's long legs and Kaoru's shorter ones; Toshiya's big feet and Kaoru's smaller ones. No matched set, the guitarist thought blearily, but good together, sometimes. After a while. Somehow. Good together.  
Tired, he let his head loll to the side. His cheek brushed Toshiya's hair, and the bassist turned to smile at him, nudging their foreheads together gently.  
'You're too good to not be the only one,' Kaoru said in a drunken whisper, his eyes closed. 'I could never share you.'  
And whilst Toshiya was still struggling over that, it was Kaoru who took the final step: who butted his head lightly forward and captured the bassist's lips with his own.  
But neither of them would ever really be able to say quite who began it. Only that they were kissing, suddenly, and that once they began they didn't stop.  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ever since Kyo confessed to really loving George Michael, I feel so much happier in making these guys listen to whatever I want them to in my stories. You can't tell me that at least Shinya doesn't enjoy Kate Bush, because I'll know you're lying.
> 
> I find it weird looking at this after it's posted. I write everything in Times New Roman so it's a big difference. For some reason I feel like sans serif fonts look less intelligent, which is actually as mad as it is stupid.
> 
> Finally, I don't know why AO3 insists on inserting a space between italics and punctuation, but oh boy does it piss me off. I tried to fix most of them but I'm only one woman.


	27. Chapter 27

Sometimes it scared him, how everything could change in a moment. In an audition, or a kiss, or a car crash. An entire life could be wiped out and a different one, a new one, born in its place.  
Kaoru took Toshiya to the floor.  
Their hands snagged in each other's clothing; their hair fell into their faces and disrupted the urgent, fervent way they kissed; one of Kaoru's feet knocked a whisky glass and it spun amber liquid out over the floor before fetching up against the wall.   
For just a moment, Toshiya pulled back. His lips were already guiltily reddened; he found himself out of breath. When he looked up Kaoru's eyes were dark brown and attempting to focus on his own in a messy kind of way, gaze slipping away to his lips, his hair, his neck before finding him again.  
'You sure?' Toshiya asked briefly. His voice came out rough; he cleared his throat.  
'Yeah.'  
'Yeah?'  
Kaoru pushed Toshiya back down and all but crawled over him, bringing their bodies together. He could feel the febrile heat of Toshiya's skin through his clothes and the bony press of hips and ribs and shoulders, promising a different kind of body: a wrong body, a male body, long and lean and unluxurious. He broke away from his lips; began to kiss his cheeks and jaw and neck. The smell of Toshiya was all around him: his skin, his clothes. His body filled Kaoru's hands. He tasted fiercely alcoholic.  
He had one moment, just one, of confusion: a feeling of being in two places at once, like part of him was here, caught up over Toshiya's body with his knees pressing against the hard wooden floor and neatly stacked piles of clothing collapsing around him; the other part elsewhere, back inside his seventeen year old self and sneaking onto the bus that ran from Nishinomiya to Kobe with a guitar and a suitcase. It had been hot. It had been one of the first really warm days of spring. And he had pushed up his window as high as it would go and the inside of the bus had filled with a clattering wind that smelled of warm asphalt, trimmed grass, car exhaust, and the road had been clear and he was out, finally, on his own. On a highway and going somewhere; somewhere _else_. Somewhere better.  
It had been the first time he had ever done something he couldn't undo.  
  
Then it ended and there was just Toshiya panting below him, propped up on his elbows, and the road was gone but that giddy, fearful feeling was stronger than ever. His legs were spread to hold Kaoru between them and when he moved forward it was to allow his thigh to gently press against the slight bulge in the front of Toshiya's jeans. He made a sound: not really a laugh but just a letting go of breath. He closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to see how uncertain Toshiya looked. He could feel the bassist's cock starting to stiffen against him.  
'If you keep doing that,' Toshiya murmured a little throatily, 'You're going to make me hard.'  
'That's okay.'  
'Is it?'   
Kaoru felt dizzy. Swallowing, he touched him. He set his fingers carefully on Toshiya's belly and let them move down, coming to rest between his legs. He could feel the shape of him. He could smell his skin and hear his fast, shallow little breaths and, above that, the sound of Kate Bush singing _The_ _Big Sky_ from the living room: _if you're coming jump, 'cause we're leaving with the big sky..._  
'Kaoru,' Toshiya said softly. His pulse was quick and hard, driving his dick to push more insistently against Kaoru's too-light touch. He felt young and inexperienced and stupid, lying in his messy bedroom with this frightened man on top of him, and he knew he should call some halt to this but instead he simply placed his hand over the top of Kaoru's, rubbed soothingly at his knuckles and made him touch harder, feel him more. The guitarist made a muffled sort of noise, and Toshiya laughed breathlessly.  
'You're drunk,' he said, and Kaoru kissed him. He kissed his lips and the hollow of his throat and then nudged at the neck of his T-shirt with his lips, dragging it down, his hot breath raising goose bumps where it touched. His hand between Toshiya's legs started to rub uncertainly, to squeeze. Still when Toshiya's hand moved up inside his T-shirt it felt like a shocking intimacy: that wide, warm palm flattening itself against his ribcage, feeling the rhythm of his heart through his skin. The tip of Toshiya's index finger brushed his nipple, and he only half-swallowed the startled sound he made. He said Toshiya's name. He was sure he did.  
Pause.  
The overhead light was on and when he opened his eyes he found Toshiya looking at him with an unreadable expression on his face. Slowly, a little awkwardly, the bassist moved out from under him. He got to his feet, and smoothed down his T-shirt.  
'We shouldn't,' he said shortly.  
He could feel Kaoru's eyes on him, but he kept his own gaze directed down at the floor. His hands were shaking slightly, he realised, and now that he was standing it was obvious how hard he was; his dick made a thick shape in his jeans. He swallowed, pushing his hair back behind his ears in an attempt to straighten himself out, gather himself together.   
'We can't,' he said.  
When he looked at Kaoru he found him flushed, guilty-looking, a dark mark around his collarbone that Toshiya vaguely remembered creating. His dark eyes were anxious, hectic, not quite lucid. They stared at each other, and Toshiya noticed that Kaoru's heart was beating so hard that it was visible from the outside: the fabric of his T-shirt twitched in rhythm.  
'Kaoru—'  
Silently, not looking quite at him any more, Kaoru's hands moved to the front of his own pants. He undid the button, and pulled down the zip. As Toshiya watched, unable to pull his gaze away, the guitarist pushed his own hand carefully inside his underwear.   
Toshiya stripped off his T-shirt. He took off his jeans. He got to his knees and kissed Kaoru gently; felt the guitarist's hands come up around his back, touching his skin. He undressed him, pulling his T-shirt off over his head and pushing his pants and boxer briefs down to his knees. He kissed his neck and his chest and his navel and felt it as Kaoru wound his trembling hands into his hair. He touched his lips to the hot, damp tip of Kaoru's cock, and tasted him.   
Kaoru said something; a rough, slurred approximation of Toshiya's name. He was murmuring it over and over; Toshiya could only just hear it over the rush of blood in his own ears and the wet, inside-outside sound of his mouth moving over Kaoru's dick, licking and sucking at it. He wanted to make him cum. He wanted him to cum _hard_. He wanted the shake in Kaoru's thigh as he tried not to push his hips forward, and he wanted the taste of him over his tongue the smell of his skin as it went to his head. He clutched at his sweet hips, such perfect curving bones.  
For Kaoru, it was lost from the moment he opened his eyes. Toshiya's messy, so familiar head was between his legs and his beautiful body was up on its knees. He supported himself on an elbow, half-draped over Kaoru's thighs, and while one hand was curled about Kaoru's hip the other was desperately working at his own cock, stroking himself quickly. He remembered the night they'd fought. Pinning Toshiya to the floor. He remembered pushing his hand in front of Toshiya's mouth, and the other man's teeth sinking into the fleshy part of his thumb—  
He struggled to sit up, to pull away. 'Toshiya,' he slurred, hand clumsily pushing at his head, 'I'm gonna cum, I'm gonna—'  
He did. His cum went over his own hand and Toshiya's lips where Kaoru hadn't been fast enough in pushing him away. When they kissed he realised that he was tasting it, but the idea didn't seem to be as big a deal as he'd imagined. More important was his hand moving over Toshiya's, fisting around the other man's dick; gauchely he pulled their bodies together. He stroked the other man inexpertly, his hand slipping, neither fast nor firm enough. Toshiya closed his eyes tight, resting his head in the crook of Kaoru's shoulder. The older man had such a familiar smell; he never would have guessed how familiar. Breathing in the scent of his skin, he felt oddly comforted. When he came, it was with a strange feeling of contentment and safety; of being held, and cared for. He kept his face where it was for a few long moments, just recovering his breath, just breathing the other man in.  
Gradually though, they came apart. Toshiya dressed himself, tucking his still sensitive cock carefully back inside his underwear, and silently he passed Kaoru his T-shirt. His legs felt weak and trembly, and the world felt hazy and oddly compressed around him, as though he was underwater. A little unsteadily he padded into the living room, and turned off the stereo. From the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink he retrieved a second bottle of liquor – somewhere along the way they'd managed to empty the first one – and he carried it back into the bedroom along with a damp cloth. Without looking Kaoru in the eyes, he wiped off their hands. Kaoru took the cloth and cleared Toshiya's cum from his belly. When he was done, Toshiya simply threw the cloth somewhere into the general mess.   
  
More whiskey. They drank without speaking, sitting side by side, almost touching but not quite. They passed the bottle back and forth, back and forth. Kaoru's head swam. It felt so heavy he could barely keep it upright. He wanted to lie down, but he knew that sitting upright was the only thing keeping him from throwing up. He wanted to touch Toshiya's hand, but that felt like an equally bad idea. Toshiya lit up a cigarette and they shared it, even though it made Kaoru feel worse. His head throbbed viciously behind the eyes. He tipped it carefully back against the wall and closed his eyes for a few moments; when he opened them again, he realised that Toshiya had fallen asleep. His body looked oddly limp and boneless, like a rag doll, and he was spilling whiskey into his lap. His head lolled to the side; to Kaoru's side.   
It didn't feel the same with their clothes between them, but awkwardly Kaoru tried to gather him up. In his arms he felt heavy, and his skin was too warm. He pressed a clumsy kiss to his temple. The bedroom tilted sharply, spinning in a way he couldn't control.  
He closed his eyes and mercifully, the world fell away into darkness.   
  
They both woke to a klaxon.   
As one they jerked into consciousness, an awkward tangle of sleep-heavy limbs breaking apart; grey daylight was filtering blearily in through the uncurtained window and the overhead light was still on, making everything look realer-than-real. The neat piles of clothing Kaoru had made were strewn across the floor as though a wind had blown in through the bedroom in the night, there were two whiskey bottles rolling around on the floor – one empty, one with an inch or so of fluid left inside it – and Kaoru's phone was emitting an alarm that sounded like the end of the world.   
'Fuck—'  
'_Fuck_.'  
Their gazes met and then parted hastily. Toshiya began scrambling to push piles of clothing to the sides of the room whilst Kaoru got quickly but unsteadily to his feet, running his hands through his messy hair and then clutching at his head; it felt like somebody had driven a pickaxe directly through one ear and out of the other. His stomach churned urgently and, pale, he hurried into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind him. Over the toilet he convulsed, throwing up whiskey and bile. He flushed it away and dragged himself up to the sink, shivering violently. He rested his head against the cold porcelain. It was soothing, almost, until Toshiya came crashing in and, as gently as possible, lowered Kaoru onto the bathroom floor, out of the way. Kaoru closed his eyes. His heart was thudding sickly and he smelled mint, harsh and fresh. When he looked up he found Toshiya grimly scrubbing at his teeth.   
'Got a spare toothbrush?' he asked weakly, and Toshiya nodded towards the bathroom cabinet. Kaoru wasn't at all sure how he got back up to his feet, but he made it. Side by side, they brushed their teeth.   
'Shit,' Toshiya kept saying, sputtering through a mouthful of white foam, 'Shit. I can't believe we just fell asleep. _Shit_.'   
Kaoru spat, still shivering but feeling slightly fresher.   
'I need to go home,' he said, bungling the words a little, like he had a cold. 'I need to get my stuff.'  
'Do you have time? We have to be at the van in—' he wasn't wearing a watch. He shrugged helplessly.  
'It's eight,' Kaoru said, his voice coming out surprisingly savagely, 'We don't have to be there until ten.'  
'Why would you set your alarm so _early_?'  
Because he hated rushing, was the answer, but he didn't feel safe opening his mouth to speak. He felt so close to vomiting that it reminded him of being at sea; he swallowed repeatedly, trying to force the feeling down. As tactfully as possible Toshiya left him in the bathroom and went instead into the kitchen, ignoring the sight of his pale, tired-looking reflection in the kettle's shiny surface as he put water on to boil. He ran his trembling hands through his hair slowly, pulling it back into a ponytail; he splashed some cold water from the kitchen sink onto his face and drew up, dripping and shivering and clutching at the edge of the counter, to think.   
They were going on tour in two hours, and he'd sucked Kaoru off. They'd drunk – god, how much had they _drunk_? He could smell himself and knew that Kaoru would smell the same way: nauseatingly alcoholic and, underneath it, like sweat.   
And oh god, he could still _feel_ it, the way Kaoru's dick had been so hot and hard against his tongue, the noises he'd made, the taste of him. He wanted a shower. He wanted to go back to sleep. He caught himself on the verge of crying, tears actually prickling at his eyes, and sniffed harshly and forced himself to straighten up, pressing his lips tightly together. The kettle boiled and he made tea. It was bitter but bracing. He lit a cigarette, but the smell of it made him retch and so he put it out again.   
When Kaoru reappeared he looked drawn and weak, so pale he was almost yellow. Toshiya offered him a cup of tea; Kaoru shook his head shortly and instead poured himself a glass of water.   
'You look like shit,' Toshiya volunteered helpfully, and Kaoru gave a terse nod.  
'You don't look so fresh yourself.' He dropped his face into his hands, rubbing at it harshly. 'God. How much did we _drink_?' Fitfully, he looked up. 'I had such a weird dream.'  
Something ice cold seemed to flood down Toshiya's back, stiffening him up.   
'Yeah? What about?'  
'Yeah.' In the morning light, looking so ill and so tired and vulnerable, Kaoru seemed very young. He had a troubled sort of expression on his face, and he opened his mouth like he was about to say more, but in the end he just shook his head. 'I don't...really remember.' He frowned suddenly, worriedly, and touched his lower lip. 'My lips feel weird.'   
'They—' Toshiya caught himself reaching out as if to touch them, but Kaoru flinched slightly before he could get there. His hand fell back down to his side.  
'They're probably just dry,' he heard himself say. 'My place is pretty dry.'   
'No,' Kaoru said slowly, uncertainly, 'I kind of feel like...did we _fight_? Last night?'  
Toshiya forced a smile onto his face. 'We always fight. You came over to fight.'   
'But – physically, I mean? I...' he tugged down the neck of his T-shirt a little, revealing a dark stain on his collarbone. 'I have this bruise.'  
There was a short silence during which Toshiya gripped his teacup hard.  
'We drank too much,' he said finally, softly, because it wasn't exactly a lie. Slowly, Kaoru nodded.   
'Right. Yeah.' He shrugged awkwardly. 'Shit. I'm sorry.'  
The back of Toshiya's throat burned viciously, but he managed to keep the smile on his face.   
'I'm sorry too.' He cleared his throat painfully. 'But anyway, you helped me pack. That was helpful. Thanks.'  
'Are you all right?' Kaoru asked doubtfully, and Toshiya nodded.  
'Mmhm. Just hungover.'  
'Right.'  
But he still sounded uncertain.  
'I need to carry on packing,' Toshiya said, his voice just about under control. 'You should head home. You don't have much time.'  
'Yeah.' He seemed to wake up, 'Yeah, god. Of course. Okay.' He swallowed queasily, running his hands through his hair again. 'Sure you'll be all right?'  
'I'm a big boy,' Toshiya snapped, and then forced himself to take a deep breath. 'I'll see you in a couple of hours. Try not to hurl in the taxi; there's a fine for that.'  
He laughed, and his eyes filled with tears again. He blinked them away hastily.  
But Kaoru wasn't laughing.   
'Toshiya—'  
'Go.' He wrapped his arms around his chest and hugged himself, shrugged as best he could. 'You don't want to be late.'   
He wanted so much to be touched by him, but instead he just squeezed himself tighter. When Kaoru smiled at him – such a sweet smile, so trusting – he thought his heart might break. 'I'll see you soon.'   
'See you.' 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyyy, so this story just surpassed 1000 hits, which is fun. Secret Dir fandom, I see you.


	28. Chapter 28

The drive out to Kawasaki was a long one.  
When they set out the sky was a turbulent grey, heavy-looking, and the light that filtered through the clouds was white and weak and thin feeling, as if there wasn't enough to go around. The first drops of rain started falling before they even got outside of the city, and by the time they reached Otsu it was a proper downpour, turning the windscreen of their minivan into a washout even with the wipers on full blast. Shinya kept peering hopefully out of his window, hoping to see the lake, but the road they travelled down seemed to be bypassing it. Their route was lined with buildings of grey concrete. There had obviously been a tree planting campaign recently: the roadside was marked out by hundreds of staked-up saplings: maples and zelkovas, mostly. They looked puny and fragile against the beating rain. Finally even Shinya grew uninspired, and sat back in his seat with a little huff.  
'Lake Biwa is supposed to be so pretty.'  
'I'd like a biwa,' Die mused. 'I wouldn't mind using one of those huge plectrums.'  
'Great,' Kyo said a little crabbily, 'We'll enrol you in an okiya right away.' His last few words were distorted somewhat by a wide yawn: Kyo wasn't a morning person.  
'They're not _just_ for geisha.'  
'I can't listen to this argument again,' Shinya said abruptly, and everyone fell quiet.  
Toshiya couldn't stop shivering, even inside his coat. He had the middle seat, pressed tight between the two guitarists; Die fidgety and restless and Kaoru pushed up against the cold window, listlessly watching the landscape flicker past. His breath fogged the glass ever so slightly. The vibrations of the engine made his teeth chatter.  
'You okay?' Toshiya asked him at one point, but all Kaoru could manage was a nod that was more like a flinch.  
He felt horribly small and exhausted and wrung out from his hangover, his whole body was trembling weakly, and there was a nasty feeling – a kind of sick foreboding – lodged uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach, keeping him from sleeping.  
It was just that the dream had been so real.  
He slipped a small, tensely white knuckle between his lips and chewed on it worriedly. For the first time since he was a kid, he felt truly scared. Perhaps he'd been nervous since, or apprehensive, but not since his childhood had there been anything like this; this was the monster under the bed, or – ha ha – in the closet; this was his worst nightmare brought to life.  
Losing control.  
Even in a dream.  
If it had been a dream.  
He was exhausted, but but he knew there was no way he would be getting any sleep. He had never felt so horribly _exposed._ It was as his dream had left a great smeary handprint across his cheeks, like a slap, and he was conscious of dragging his hair in around his face absently, chewing on it, covering his eyes with it, trying to hide behind it before they all saw. In the small space, he drew his knees up to his chest awkwardly; tucked his elbows in, and took what comfort he could from his own feeble warmth.  
And of course, there was Toshiya, sitting next to him. He was wearing headphones now, and his eyes were closed, but he wasn't asleep. Kaoru could feel that just as clearly as he could feel his own sick heartbeat; relaxed as Toshiya's body was, his mind was wide awake, and it was _racing_. Kaoru didn't know how he knew it, but he did. It made him think of all those delicate instruments people used in paranormal investigations; how they would go fucked up and freak out if you brought them close to the bassist.  
He sighed, slipped lower on his seat.  
Chewed on a knuckle. Tasted blood, and waited.  
  
Past midday the rain started to turn to sleet, and then to soft flurries of snow, and their tired minivan swerved a wide right and wheezed its way into the concrete parking lot of a small petrol station with a 7-Eleven attached. One by one they awkwardly unfolded, spilling out into the drab March light, stretching out their cramped limbs and sectioning off, lighting cigarettes and shrugging jackets tighter around their bodies. After jittering in the back of the minivan for almost three hours Kaoru felt close to jumping right out of his own skin. He stood by and lit a cigarette but discarded it almost instantly, feeling sick. He found Toshiya standing at an awkward distance from him, elbows uncharacteristically tucked, making him look smaller. He wasn't smoking, either.  
'Let's go inside,' he muttered to the bassist. 'Don't stand out here. You'll catch a cold.'  
'I don't have any cash.'  
'I'll buy you a coffee,' Kaoru said shortly. He wanted to be nicer about it, but he couldn't; shrugging jerkily, he spun around and made for the little store. Inside, it was drab but scrupulously clean. It was empty but for themselves and the single cashier. Over the tannoy an annoyingly familiar, perky sort of tune was playing, soupily orchestral, and Kaoru thought his fragile mind might actually snap in two when he figured out what it was: a muzak version of _Islands In The Stream_.  
Perfect.  
Not for the first time, he had the fleeting thought that his whole life might be some sort of simulation, and that the person in control might not like him very much. He closed his eyes against the fluorescent strip lighting and made his way to the self-service coffee station at the back, sensing that Toshiya was shadowing him; he poured himself a large cup of decaf, reasoning that any more nervous energy might cause him to simply burst into a million razor-edged pieces.  
With a soft sigh, Toshiya leant against a nearby shelf and toyed with his cigarette packet.  
'Decaf?' Kaoru offered tensely, but the bassist gave a short shake of his head.  
'Regular,' he said tiredly. 'Thanks.'  
There was a light croak to his voice. Kaoru poured his drink and went to hand it to him, but even when Toshiya reached out he found himself keeping a hold of it. It was burning his palm, but he gripped it tighter.  
'Last night,' he said at last, 'I don't remember anything.'  
Toshiya looked unnerved. 'That's okay,' he said.  
'But I...' Kaoru gritted his teeth awkwardly, 'I feel – weird. I just – I need to know if anything happened.'  
The bassist pulled the steaming cup out of his grip. 'Don't wreck your hands,' he mumbled, 'You'll need them.'  
'Toshiya—' Kaoru's gaze was haggard, 'Please.'  
Toshiya hesitated. He took a sip of his too-hot coffee just to stall for time; it burned all the way down his throat.  
Funny how you could stop seeing something if you were too close to it. It was like he was viewing Kaoru clearly for the first time all day: his hands shaking, his face pale, the ends of his newly lightened hair damp and frayed where he'd been chewing on them. His eyes were vivid, shadowed, brighter than usual: the eyes of an animal. Some small desperate animal caught in a trap.  
_He is absolutely fucking terrified._   
His eyes liquid, almost crazy with fear.  
'Kaoru,' he said lowly, 'Listen to me. You...'  
Pause. Deep breath. Another sip of coffee. It hurt as much as if he'd swallowed a shard of glass.  
'You didn't do anything you would regret. Okay?'  
'We – I – didn't?'  
'No.' Toshiya gave him a strained smile, 'I would never let you do that.'  
'Okay,' Kaoru said, quiet. He nodded, pushed hair out of his face agitatedly, 'Yeah, okay.'  
'You're just jittery because of the tour.'  
Kaoru swallowed. 'All right.' He seemed to collect himself a little: 'I mean, yeah. I guess.' He paused. 'We have so much to prove, with this one. I wish we didn't have that week off before we fly out to Shanghai. What's that week for? Nothing.'  
'Resting, maybe,' Toshiya said, amused in spite of himself, but Kaoru just gave his head an anxious shake.  
'It's pointless. Nobody will be resting. We'll all just be waiting to get on with it. Figure out if we can play shows overseas or not.'  
'Don't think about it,' Toshiya said. 'If you're worried about putting on a shitty show in China, you know what's going to happen?'  
'What?'  
'You're going to put on a shitty show in Kawasaki.'  
Kaoru cracked half a smile. 'Makes sense.'  
'So. Band leader. Where are we, anyway?'  
'Right now?'  
'Right now.'  
'I don't know. The heart of nowhere.'  
'The snow's getting heavier.'  
It was. The sky had darkened perceptibly and the snow was no longer a mere flurry: fat, heavy flakes fell very vertically from the clouds, and the parking lot and petrol pumps were already covered in a thin layer of white. Through the windows of the store front, they could see their three bandmates caught up in it like the little plaster figures inside of a snowglobe: Die pacing slowly with his cigarette, watching his own feet soak dark prints as he walked; Shinya still and very young-looking in his thick parka, his head tipped right back to catch the flakes delicately on his tongue; Kyo huddled and cold-looking as he smoked, his free hand stuffed into his pocket but the other red-fingered from the chill. Snow was collecting on his shoulders and the top of his head, as if he was a statue.  
Neither Kaoru nor Toshiya said so – or could even have found the words to say so; admitting to such a thing would have been far, far too soppy – but looking out at them, they felt oddly touched. Quietly they stood watching, Toshiya stirring his coffee and Kaoru holding onto the counter to steady himself.  
It was like a marriage, Kaoru found himself thinking: like an arranged marriage, the five of them flung together for better or worse, till death do us part. A shaky marriage, a messy one, torn and bleeding and spilling out of its borders in places. But still something that bound them together. Still something worth working on, and protecting, and saving.  
'We should go,' Kaoru said at last. 'We don't want to get caught in this.'  
He caught Toshiya's wry smile. 'We're already caught in it,' he said, but they paid and left without talking about anything else.  
  
The rest of the drive went by painfully slowly. The roads were slippery and unpredictable and the atmosphere in the minivan was that of a collection of people all pretending to relax, but inwardly holding themselves tense for every skid or whine of the brakes. By the time they arrived at their little hotel it was long dark and much, much later than they'd planned, but their relief to have arrived in one piece had translated itself into a kind of nervous-excited mania. They checked in and were herded out at once to eat, but nobody had much of an appetite; instead, so many cigarettes were smoked around the table that Shinya ended up fashioning himself a face mask out of a paper napkin.  
'There was a dinner lady at my elementary school who always, always wore a face mask,' Die said, obliviously gesturing towards Shinya with his lit cigarette. 'We all thought she must be some kind of hypochondriac, or germophobe, or something. But then one day...' he leant forwards conspiratorially, 'I saw her without it.'  
He let his dramatic silence linger for so long that Toshiya felt compelled to offer, 'And...?'  
'And she had a moustache,' Die finished neatly, taking a swig of his beer. 'A really nice, neat little moustache. All debonair, like that British actor.'  
'Charlie Chaplin?' Kyo guessed incredulously.  
'_No_.'  
'Who else has a famous moustache?'  
'Laurence Olivier,' Shinya substituted sensibly.  
'_That's_ it!'  
'He doesn't have a famous moustache!'  
'No, but he's famous, and he has a moustache.' Shinya lifted his improvised mask to take a sip of his own beer. 'There was a dinner lady at my school that I really liked.'  
'Uh oh. Is this the story of how sweet precious Shinya lost his sweet precious virginity?'  
'I was eight years old,' Shinya said with dignity. 'She was such a kind lady.'  
'What a great story.'  
'She was the first person who ever told me that I should be a musician.'  
That perked Toshiya up. 'When you were eight ? How did _that_ come up?'  
'Well.' Shinya settled his hands on the tabletop demurely, 'I was really obsessed with the Squeeze song _Cool For Cats_. I heard it on the radio and I loved it so much my parents bought me the 7 inch single. I played it so much I learnt all the words by heart.'  
'In _English_?'  
'In English.'  
'Right.' Toshiya waited and then prompted, 'So this dinner lady...?'  
'Oh. One day at lunch time I asked her to come with me because I had something to tell her in secret. I think she thought I was being bullied. I recited the whole thing for her. I don't remember why.' He shook his pretty head delicately. 'Anyway, she told me that I should be a musician.'  
There was a repressed sort of silence. Die had buried his face in his hands.  
'Did you do the stammer on the last bit?' he asked finally, his voice a little muffled.  
'Of course. “It's not like that on the TV when it's cool for cats, it's cool for ca-a-a-a-ats”.'  
Everyone fell quiet again. Die looked as though he was about to explode; his face was purpling and Toshiya was worried that he might actually be in danger of cracking a rib. Next to him, Kaoru still looked incredibly hungover, but he was smiling in a friendly, weary sort of way. Their eyes met, and Toshiya found himself smiling back.  
Then he felt the heat starting to rise in his cheeks, and so quickly looked away.  
It was better, he told himself firmly, that Kaoru didn't remember. Better for him to believe what he had to. They had been given a blank slate, a second chance to try not to fuck everything up; how many people could expect to receive that in their lives? They were lucky, really. Incredibly lucky.  
Kaoru wasn't looking at him any more. His eyes had the distant look they took on when there was music in his head, and he was tapping a finger softly, rhythmically on the tabletop, and on his face was a soft, fond, faraway sort of smile that made Toshiya's heart hurt.  
  
'Bad luck,' Die told him back at the hotel, waving a room key at him, 'You're sharing.'  
'We normally draw straws,' Toshiya said, still just about awake enough to feel indignant, 'What happened to that?'  
Die gave an amiable shrug. 'Since Kaoru looks like he's about to barf, I figured he could have the single room tonight.'  
'I'm hungover too,' Toshiya muttered a little petulantly, and Die gave him a curious look.  
'Really? What did _you_ get up to last night?'  
'Oh. Not much, really,' he said hurriedly. He was very tired, he realised: the lobby seemed to be slipping into soft focus. He blinked his eyes firmly. 'Who've I got?'  
'Cool For Cats. Maybe if you ask nice he'll do you an encore.'  
'My performance fee is higher these days,' Shinya said mildly, making Die jump; he had appeared quite silently at his elbow. 'Is that our key?' Without waiting for an answer, he snatched it neatly from Die's slack fingers and nodded at Toshiya. 'Come on, let's go. You look exhausted.'  
'Boy, thanks,' Toshiya said sarcastically, but gave him a tired smile. It was soothing, watching the swish of Shinya's ponytail as he climbed the stairs; it was nice, too, to have somebody else figure out where their room was, and unlock the door, and go around turning on lamps and drawing curtains. Shinya moved in such an economical way, with not a single gesture wasted.  
'Do you want to shower first?' he was asking now decorously, and Toshiya gave a one-shouldered shrug, dropping down onto the closest of the two beds.  
'I showered this morning.'  
'Yes, but you stink of alcohol. I think you've been sweating it out.'  
'Tell me how you really feel, why don't you?' Toshiya said, stung, and Shinya gave him an abbreviated sort of smile.  
'You might feel better,' he said in a gentler voice, 'That's all.'  
It was easier not to argue, so Toshiya did what he was told. Shinya was right, as well; he did feel a little better once he was clean and his teeth were brushed. With a towel around his waist he sat down to comb through his wet hair, but lost steam halfway through and simply let his arm dangle there. Shinya was bustling around the room, laying out his clothes for tomorrow and setting out his contact lens case and the special lotion he massaged into his thumb and wrist joints to keep them from cramping up. There was something so comforting about watching him go about his routine, setting his little life neatly back into order, that Toshiya felt almost jealous. It was as though Shinya had decided long ago how his life should be arranged, and saw no reason to change it. That was what he envied – not the organisation, but the certainty. He blinked sleepily. The world seemed to be growing grey and fuzzy at the edges, as though it was turning into an old movie.  
'Toshiya.' A gentle hand shook his shoulder, and he heard his own lips mumble something incoherent. 'Come on, you're falling asleep. I got your pyjamas out. Put them on and get into bed.'  
It was unlike Shinya to reach out and touch somebody. It was pathetic, Toshiya thought, how grateful he felt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes I feel like if I told people how much time I've spent looking at maps of various Japanese cities for this story, they would never believe me. My google maps has started to default to Osaka, rather than Bristol. I'll give you three guesses as to which of these places I actually live in. (Both are pretty cool.)


	29. Chapter 29

Kaoru couldn't sleep.  
He lay on his back with his wide, aching eyes straining up at the ceiling in order to keep himself from looking at the digital alarm clock by his bed. A few feet across the room Shinya was lying still beneath his blanket, his slow breaths soft and even. It felt almost smug: an advertisement for sleep. Kaoru's hands made fists in the bed sheets.  
It was March 30th, or more likely the 31st  by now, and they were in Nagano, and it was raining: Kaoru could hear the steady drip and crackle of it and the faint sounds of car tyres hissing over wet asphalt. The sounds were dreamy, soft; he kept finding himself almost floating upon them, buoyant on their rush and flow, before coming back to full wakefulness with a start that set his heart racing and tightened his muscles painfully.  
He hadn't slept in three days now. He grabbed snatches of rest in the minivan, curled into himself like some wounded animal, but he was constantly half-aware of the ebb and flow of conversation happening around him, the throb of the van's engine and the hum of the radio. The sounds made their way into his edgy, fitful dreams and became a backdrop for scenes where his band inexplicably lost all their instruments or Kaoru himself forgot, halfway through a show, how to play guitar, or they turned around and realised suddenly that they were playing to an empty auditorium and that the lights had all gone out and the stage was dark.  
He woke feeling more exhausted than ever. His bandmates, all around him, seemed to slip in and out of focus; food didn't hold much appeal any more. Standing in the shower, he found the edges of his vision clouding brown and his limbs starting to slacken, but as soon as he got into bed his mind came joltingly, painfully alive.  
He worried that he was doing it wrong; that he was living his life wrong. Insane, because they were successful: their album was top three on the Oricon; they had just played a run of triumphant sold out shows; their label was sending them on tour to China and Taiwan then, in the summer, to Korea. If those shows went well, who knew what then? Europe? America?  
He felt as if he'd awoken, suddenly, halfway through the first show of their tour, back in Kawasaki. He'd found himself at the far right edge of the stage, his fingers running up and down his guitar strings without him needing to tell them to, and he had looked out at his band where they were scattered to the left of him – Die his bookend at the opposite edge of the stage, playing up to the crowd; Shinya on the drum riser, his hair flying out around him; Kyo front and centre, body contorted; Toshiya closest to him with his bass held almost vertically down the length of his body in that particular way he had, safe and beautiful in his spotlight – and it had felt as though he was seeing them for the very first time; seeing them as professionals for the first time; as people who were good at this. No, better than good: people who were _naturals_ at this. People who found it easy; found it easier than not doing it.  
If you looked at the surface of things – only the surface – then everything was wonderful. They were five best friends having the time of their lives together and getting paid for it, and nothing could be better.  
But closer up, there were cracks.  
Cracks like Kyo keeping as far away from Toshiya as he could possibly get, interacting with him only onstage, playing his part well when necessary but otherwise flat-out ignoring him.  
Cracks like Kaoru getting a sort of swooping, dipping sensation in his stomach every time the bassist so much as smiled at him.  
Cracks like the dream that he couldn't stop thinking about; the dream that had felt like more than a dream.  
Wishful thinking, of course.  
Of course.  
But he thought maybe that was why, in the middle of what should have felt like the highest point of his life, Kaoru felt suddenly in danger of falling apart. That no matter how many successes his band may have accumulated, something important was missing from the core of them, and that the tiniest crack to their outer shell might reveal the truth of the matter: that at their heart was a huge and aching vacancy, hollow as the sky.  
He thought about the way Toshiya held his bass, the body of his instrument pressed against his narrow hips. He would have known him, he thought, from that silhouette alone: that shape that should have been so awkward, but wasn't. That worked.  
  
When the time on the digital clock was drawing close to five in the morning, Kaoru put his glasses on and got out of bed. He did it carefully, with slow movements, because the bed frame was the cheap, creaky brass type that squeaked, and Shinya slept lightly. He didn't turn on any lights; he didn't need to. After staring up into the darkness for so long, his eyes had adjusted, and he cautiously tiptoed around putting a coat on over his pyjamas and collecting his cigarettes and lighter and key from his bedside table. In the little entryway to their hotel room he stepped into his boots and, superstitiously avoiding looking in Shinya's direction, he stepped out into the hallway and latched the door quietly behind him.  
Silence.  
There was something about the emptiness of hotel corridors that made them seem quieter than anywhere else, like the deadest places on earth, even though he knew logically that most of the doors he was passing had a living, breathing human behind them. There was something about their fixed level of dim yellow lighting that gave him the creeps, like a permanent daylight; like you weren't supposed to know if it was noon or midnight. No windows. Tiredly, he blinked. There was a mirror mounted on the wall, probably to make the space look wider, and his reflection looked pale and tired and pinched, with dark circles under his eyes that his glasses couldn't hide. He ran a hand through his hair, trying to flatten it down. The stairwell was equally empty, and so was the lobby, though the lights remained on and there was a call bell for the night receptionist. Kaoru walked vaguely through, narrowly avoiding tripping over his trailing laces. He felt watched; followed.  
A pathetic fear, he realised. He was so alone that his heartbeat was audible.  
He shouldered the front door open and walked out into the night.  
  
In a way, it almost reminded him of their first winter together.  
Toshiya was sitting cross-legged on the street, directly under the hotel's awning, where the rain had barely touched. A cigarette was glowing between his fingers, mostly ignored as he fiddled with his phone. He didn't look at all surprised to see Kaoru; he glanced up, shot the older man a quick, tired smile, and made as if to get to his feet. He didn't, though; just settled himself more firmly against the wall and smiled again, in that same odd, weary way.  
'Morning,' Toshiya said in a slightly husky voice.  
'Yeah. Morning.'  
'What are you doing out here?'  
Like a ticket of entry, Kaoru held his cigarette packet aloft. 'Same thing you are.'  
'Right.' With that same weird, strained smile, Toshiya patted the patch of pavement next to him, 'Take a seat then, I guess.'  
Kaoru huffed a laugh. 'Thanks.'  
Sitting down on the cold ground didn't feel as bad as he'd thought it would. His bones already felt frozen, and otherwise his body was oddly numb. He leant back against the side of the hotel with a soft sigh, stuck a cigarette between his lips and lit it. 'Who're you texting?' he asked.  
'Huh? Oh...' Toshiya gave a soft laugh, his breath a white cloud in the cold air, 'Yoshiki, actually. I can pretty much always count on him to be awake.' Again: that strange, pinched smile. 'Like you.'  
'You still – you keep in touch with him?'  
'Sure.'  
'But – you don't still—'  
Toshiya's lips twisted a little wryly around his cigarette. 'We're friends,' he stated, his voice light but firm. 'That's all.'  
'Right. Sorry.'  
Toshiya was quiet for a moment. 'That's okay.' He paused again. 'He's lonely,' he added. 'A lonely person.'  
'Maybe he should find some other starry-eyed kid to exploit, then,' Kaoru said viciously.  
For an uncomfortable few moments the two of them smoked without talking, looking out at the shadowy mountain range in the distance. In the rain the view was blurred and somehow unreal-looking, like the painted-on backdrop of a play.  
'I hate hotels,' Toshiya volunteered finally, clutching his coat tightly around him.  
'Yeah?'  
'Yeah. I can't...I dunno. It's like I can't relax; I'm always worried about breaking something or messing it up.'  
Kaoru snorted a soft laugh. 'That sounds like my house growing up.'  
Toshiya shot him a look. 'Really?'  
'Yeah. We just...my parents had this thing going; they were part of some cultural heritage preservation programme. I don't know. It was...we had a traditional-style house, and our bedrooms and most of our living spaces had to be kept traditional-style too, and the house was open for tours a few times a year.'  
Toshiya blinked at him. 'God.'  
'It was really important to them,' Kaoru said, his tone of voice very neutral, like he didn't really care. S till, Toshiya wondered what it must have been like, growing up in a house where you couldn't touch anything.  
'I used to play in the cupboard,' Kaoru said suddenly. He sounded surprised by the memory; he looked around at Toshiya, as if expecting him to vouch for the truthfulness of it. 'The big closet in my bedroom, where my bedding was stored. I would climb in there and close the door behind me, and...' he shrugged.  
'That sounds _horrible_.'  
'No...' he shook his head gently, 'I loved that cupboard. I know it sounds weird. But I loved how safe it felt, and how dark and close it was in there. I loved how it always smelled like heat.'  
The smile Toshiya gave him was a little more natural this time, and without really thinking about it, Kaoru smiled back. Then the pit of his stomach did that weird swooping, dropping thing, like he was on a roller coaster, and he made himself look back down at the pavement.  
'I used to just run away,' Toshiya said quietly. 'When I couldn't take it at home, I mean. There was country all around us and I just used to walk for hours. I had this idea that if I walked far enough in the right direction, I'd hit the city.' He snorted. 'Never did, of course.'  
  
There was a silence and then Kaoru said, 'I thought you might run away from us, that first winter.'  
'Yeah, I know. I used to think about it a lot.' He shrugged, forcing a light-hearted tone of voice, 'It worked out though, didn't it? Anyway, it wasn't like I really had anywhere to go back to.'  
'I guess I don't, either,' Kaoru said, surprising himself. Toshiya gave him a curious look.  
'Is your family...?'  
The cold of the ground seemed to be sinking into Kaoru's bones, and he shifted uncomfortably. He wasn't really aware that in tugging his coat tighter around his body he was also drawing closer to his bandmate, trapping their meagre warmth between them.  
'They don't exactly approve of the whole music thing, especially...' he faltered. 'The visual side. My dad said—'  
He cut himself off abruptly and Toshiya smiled.  
'Said it'd make you _gay_?'  
'Something like that,' Kaoru said uncomfortably. 'I wasn't ever allowed to put up posters in my room, but I had an X Japan poster that I'd cut out of a magazine, and I kept it—' he huffed an incredulous laugh at the memory, 'I kept it, folded up, inside an _encyclopedia_. When my dad found it, he was furious. Said they were all faggots and scum and that I was going to turn out just like them if I carried on the way I was.' He sighed. 'Idea was, I was supposed to go to university and be something respectable. A lawyer, like him, or a doctor or something.'  
Toshiya drew his legs up, hugging his knees tightly against his chest. 'What about your mother?'  
'I don't know. She still talks to me, but it's...I feel like she's always so disappointed. Or—' he struggled, 'like she's just waiting for me to feel so _guilty_ about what I'm doing, and how things have turned out. Like I've ruined everything, but we just dance around it. It's...' under Toshiya's unwavering gaze, he hesitated, but made himself go on: '_exhausting_, honestly. Sometimes I'd rather she just didn't bother.'  
He stopped, pressing his lips together. Toshiya wasn't saying anything, and Kaoru couldn't seem to look at him. What the hell was he _doing_, anyway, complaining about his mother talking to him when Toshiya didn't even know where his parents were; when he hadn't heard so much as a word from them in years? Was he fucking _stupid_?  
Then he dropped his cigarette in surprise; Toshiya had taken his hand. He had done so limply, just wrapping his fingers around the top of Kaoru's knuckles, and when Kaoru snuck him a disbelieving glance Toshiya gave him a fractured sort of smile.  
'Nothing gay,' he said softly. 'Don't worry.'  
Woodenly Kaoru smiled back at him, but his heart hurt.  
'Oh, hey,' Toshiya said next, his sharp dark gaze darting up ahead of them, 'Look. It's getting light.'  
It was: the mountains were a dark silhouette against an eastern sky that was more blue now than black, and when Kaoru paid attention, he realised that the birds had been singing for some time.  
A little miserably, he dared to give Toshiya's hand a slight squeeze in return. Pathetic, he thought, the little rush it gave him; the buoyant feeling in the pit of his stomach. Hopeless, really.  
'Happy birthday,' he mumbled, and Toshiya grinned, perching his chin on top of his knees.  
'You remembered.'  
'Yeah, well. It's the same date as last year, so.'  
Toshiya snorted. 'That is _such_ a shitty joke.'  
'I'm full of them,' Kaoru said wearily.  
'You should be ashamed,' Toshiya told him earnestly. He let go of his hand. 'C'mon. We should try and get at least a little sleep.'  
'I guess.'  
'You look exhausted,' Toshiya told him gently.  
'Wow, thanks, I never get tired of hearing that.'  
But he got to his feet and allowed his weary body to follow Toshiya back inside, into the warm, and up into the insulated silence of the stairwell and hallway. He was aware of favouring the hand that Toshiya had touched; of treating it extra gently, as if the bassist's fingerprints had left some mark on him that he wanted to preserve. Inside his hotel room the air was incredibly still and soft and quiet. He took off his boots and coat; fell onto the mattress. He was asleep before he'd even pulled the covers over him.  
When he dreamed, it was of a detail he hadn't even noticed at the time: the bassist's bare feet on the pavement, thin and delicate and bright red from cold. They sat side by side in the early dawn, listening to the din the birds made. The rain continued to fall, and when Toshiya finally stood up, he became strangely lost within it, as if it was made from something more opaque than just water. He appeared as a person behind bars, reaching through, his voice croaky and lonesome and beautiful.

  
  



	30. Chapter 30

It turned out that Kaoru had been right: the six or so days they had off between legs of their tour _were_ pointless.  
Or, no: they were _almost_ pointless. They _would_ have been pointless. Were _supposed_ to have been pointless – relaxing time when nobody could possibly relax; rest time when all any of them could think about was working – except Toshiya spent every single one of those six days with Kaoru.   
Not working, just...hanging out.   
It started on the way home from Niigata. Their management hadn't wanted to pay for an extra night's worth of hotel rooms and so they scrubbed up as best they could at the venue (awkward, since there were no showers, only cramped little sinks) and then were packed into the minivan again, simultaneously wrung out with exhaustion and jittery with post-live adrenaline, for the seven hour drive back to Osaka. They took the coastal route, which was shortest. It might have been a nice journey in the daytime, but motoring through the night all they could see was the wide black sea and the shadowy forms of various islands, their own ghostly reflected faces superimposed atop them, and then the sickly orange light of one or another city they passed through: Nagaoka, Toyama, Fukui. Around dawn they encountered Lake Biwa again, approaching from the north this time, and managed to beg a ten minute reprieve from their nightlong journey to see it. They parked up near the little Shinto shrine on the northern shore; not the famous one further down, but a remote little scattering of statues on the sandy, gravelly earth. The water was liquid gold in the sunrise, almost too bright to look at. The opposite shore was too far away to see.  
Toshiya took off his shoes and picked his careful way out over the rocks, onto the scanty stretch of reddish sand at the shoreline. He was aware of the others following behind him – Shinya making shrill noises of distress as Die threatened to push him in the water; Kyo giving a muffled curse where he nearly slipped – but mostly, he let their little sounds wash over him. The water made a soft lapping noise. For some reason he'd imagined there wouldn't be any kind of tide, but frothy little wavelets kept threatening to run over his feet. Interestedly, he dug his toes into the damp sand, enjoying the cold freshness of it; he created a little well where the water ran and then could not escape from, a tiny tidepool, until the wash won out and smoothed it flat again.   
'Why is it called Lake Biwa, anyway?' he asked idly.  
'The shape.' Kaoru's deep, firm, resolute voice from behind him, only a little hoarse through lack of sleep. 'People used to say it was the shape of a biwa. The goddess Benzaiten lived on an island in the lake, and it was her favourite instrument.' He gave a wry half-smile. 'Supposedly.'   
Toshiya gave him a look of good-natured exasperation. 'You learn this stuff just in case, or what?'   
'No; there was an information board further back.'   
Toshiya laughed and Kaoru swallowed, looking down at his feet. 'You still have stage makeup on,' he told him.  
'Yeah, so do you.' Toshiya gestured around his own eyes, 'Here...and here.'   
'Shit. I thought I got it all.' He pulled his sweater cuff over his hand and scrubbed ineffectually at his face.   
Toshiya tried to tuck his smile away, turning back towards the water.   
'So,' he asked a little awkwardly, 'You have any plans for this week?'  
Kaoru snorted. 'I figure agonising over the foreign shows is going to take up most of my time.'   
'But the tour's gone so well.'   
'We don't even speak the language. How're we supposed to...?'   
'Well, I'm excited,' Toshiya said declaratively.   
'Yeah?'  
'Mm. Apart from everything else, I'm looking forward to going on a plane.'   
'You've never flown before?'   
'What do you think?' Toshiya asked a little narrowly, and Kaoru gave a flinching kind of shrug, sticking his hands into his pockets.  
'Sorry,' he mumbled.   
'It's gonna be cool,' Toshiya said in a decisive tone of voice. 'You worry too much.'   
'Mm. So I've heard.'   
They stood silently looking out at the lake for a few moments, and then Kaoru said, 'I guess I do have a few song ideas I could work on.'  
'In case you fancy a break,' Toshiya said slyly.  
'Yeah.'  
'Good.'  
'Maybe you wouldn't mind hearing some,' Kaoru said boldly, and then swallowed hard. Toshiya was quiet for so long, his eyes resting on the sparkling water, that he panicked and started to rapidly backpedal, 'Just because it's useful for someone else to, sometimes. Don't worry about it. I'm not trying to make you work. It was just—'   
'Let's do it,' Toshiya said, interrupting him. He gave an uncomfortable shrug. 'Sorry. I was spacing out.'  
'We haven't slept.'  
'Yeah.'  
After that, it was time to get back into the minivan.  
  
So that was how it started, with Toshiya coming around to Kaoru's apartment late in the afternoon of that first day back; and it _was_ work, at first. Toshiya brought his bass with him, and Kaoru ran through a few ideas he had, and Toshiya gave his thoughts and they played around a little...but then they got hungry, and so decided to head out to a tiny little okonomiyaki place not far down Kaoru's street, and on the way they passed a real estate agent, and Toshiya dithered in front of the window and ended up going in for a brochure, and over their food they flipped through the various apartments on offer and debated the benefits and shortfalls of each one. They both agreed that he should be looking to move further north, but how much further: Naniwa, Chuo? Wouldn't buying a place in Chuo mean throwing more money after less space? Once Kaoru adjusted to Toshiya's direct way of speaking, he realised that the younger man wasn't arguing with him; he just wanted his honest opinion. Were these industrial harbourside places bleak in a cool, artsy way or an ugly, deprived way? Was there any point in getting to attracted to places with gardens, when he mostly wouldn't be home to maintain it? What about places that allowed pets?   
They had a good time, actually. They went to one bar and debated going out to another, but Toshiya looked so sleepy that Kaoru found himself feeling weirdly protective of him, and so ended up bullying him into getting a taxi home. When Toshiya argued he heard himself saying, 'Otherwise I'll worry about you,' and despite the slightly odd look Toshiya gave him, he realised that it was true.   
And then the next day, Kaoru was at a loose end. He'd slept okay, he supposed – better than normal; at least a few hours – but his mind felt thick and sticky and lethargic. The walls of his apartment had seemed to be closing in on him but the weather outside was blustery and springlike, so he'd ended up taking himself outside for a walk. He headed nowhere in particular, diverting down roads that looked interesting; it was nice not to feel any pressure to _get_ anywhere. He drifted through Namba, letting its crush of people simply flow past him, and walked the canal through Dotonbori, with the neons reflecting on the water and the tourist boats cruising by. He walked past a canal-side apartment building with a signboard advertising new flats for sale. He doubled back.   
It was the kind of place, he thought, he wouldn't mind living himself: a better area, a nice building. Almost without thinking about it he called the telephone number on the sign and set up a viewing for that evening, and then he called Toshiya.   
'An apartment...for you, you mean?' the bassist said, sounding confused.  
'No, for you, you idiot. I – you don't have to. I can cancel the appointment. It just looks nice.'  
'No, I...hang on. What's the address again? I need to write this down.'  
Kaoru reeled off the address and the telephone number for the estate agent, smiling at the sound of Toshiya scribbling busily at the other end of the phone.   
'At seven?' Toshiya double-checked a little feverishly.   
'Seven,' Kaoru agreed.  
'Wow. Okay. Thanks, Kaoru. You didn't have to do this.'  
That made Kaoru feel a little awkward; he shrugged even though Toshiya couldn't see him.   
'Yeah, I know.'  
'I hate estate agents. I think I'm scared of them. I panic and I never know what questions to ask. I always forget, I mean.' He dropped his voice slightly. 'I can't _buy_ somewhere, Kaoru. I'm not a grown-up. I can't just..._own property_.'   
'Shinya owns his place.'  
'Yeah, but _mentally_, Shinya's much older than me.'  
'Yeah, but _physically_, he's a foetus, so at least take a look at the place.' He hesitated. 'If you're nervous I can come with you.'  
There was a pause that made him feel as though he could taste his own heart, thudding sickly in the back of his throat, but he made himself keep quiet.  
'Really?' Toshiya said at last.  
'Yeah. I can...you know. Help you remember your questions, and stuff.'   
There was another pause.   
'I'd have to buy you dinner after,' Toshiya said. 'To say thank you.'   
It was funny, Kaoru thought: the street suddenly looked even more attractive than it had done before. Even the people walking down it were beautiful. This really was such a wonderful city.  
'I couldn't let you buy me dinner,' he said steadily.  
'Don't make me threaten to _cook_ for you.'   
'Okay, god. You can buy me dinner, but then I'll have to take you out for a drink.'  
'One measly drink for a whole dinner?'  
'Fine; I'll have to take you out on a bender.'   
'That's more like it,' Toshiya said crisply. 'I guess I'll see you later.'  
And then, softer: 'Thanks, Kaoru.'   
  
So they went to look at the apartment, and Toshiya took him out to a laid-back little curry place that he knew of, and afterwards they stayed on at the restaurant's bar drinking beer after beer and talking about, it seemed, everything. Kaoru told him about how his first girlfriend had cheated on him, and how stupid he felt for letting a high school relationship rankle so much: Toshiya told him about his first ever kiss, which had been with a girl, and how guilty he had felt afterwards. He was dressed so simply, in tight black jeans and an oversized sweatshirt, and his light brown hair was free from the spikes he sprayed it into onstage and was almost curling, tousled around his face. Kaoru didn't want to stop looking at him.   
There were a few times that week – excitedly comparing their finds at a second hand record store in Namba, or walking through the blossom at the Castle Park, or sitting next to Toshiya on the subway so that their knees touched – where Kaoru did almost wake up for a moment, and ask himself just what the hell he thought he was doing. And more to the point, why was Toshiya going along with it? Was he just bored, unwilling to spend another week thinking about tour dates and travel, or did he – horrible thought – maybe even _pity_ him? Kaoru had straight-up admitted that he was going to be alone this week, after all. Did Toshiya think that was pathetic; did he feel sorry for him? He had said (offhand, over a dinner in which Kaoru rather shyly confessed that he much preferred to eat with someone else than alone) that they would need to find Kaoru a girlfriend: somehow, that had driven something like a steel rod right through his chest. Up until that point, he realised, he'd been thinking of this as a really great date.  
But it _wasn't_ a date. He forced himself to keep remembering that even though it hurt. It wasn't a date, and it never _would_ be a date, because he was mostly straight and because they worked together and because Toshiya would never look at him that way anyway.   
Still, it was a good week: one of Kaoru's best. And he didn't kid himself; he knew it couldn't be like this all the time. But he valued it, for what it was, in the same way that people valued flowers: as something beautiful, something perfect, that would one day wither and blacken and die.  
  
Their flight to Shanghai was booked in for four o'clock on the afternoon of the eighth, but it was around noon when they all met up at Kansai International; they were all, Toshiya figured, nervy, even if they were trying not to show it. It was a Monday afternoon and the terminal was fairly quiet: still, he liked to see the people that were around, all dressed for different climates: there went a couple in shorts and flip-flops; there went a group of young men carrying bags the size and shape of ironing boards and dressed in down jackets with ski passes dangling from their zips; there went a whole raft of white foreigners, cameras slung around their necks and gigantic wheeled suitcases following behind them.   
They sailed through check-in, and security. It was the idea of their equipment getting lost that seemed to trouble Kaoru most of all; once they were all through to departures – or the departure _lounge_, as Toshiya noted it was rather grandly called – he was more or less glued to his phone, ringing this or that staff member and asking rapid-fire questions in the abrupt tone he always took on when he was anxious.  
Toshiya, however, was _fascinated_. He had been expecting something like a train station – in fact, he realised belatedly, he had pictured the airport more or less exactly as Nagano railway station, which now seemed like a rather deprived rural outpost – but all around him were people and restaurants and signs advertising shower facilities and multifaith prayer rooms and massages, row upon row upon row of seats, and fancy, highly scented shops like Chanel. He'd never seen a Chanel store in real life; he went in and looked, wide-eyed, even though the sales staff didn't seem to want him there. For Kaoru and Die and Kyo, aeroplane travel was normal; they seemed unswayed. Kaoru was still frantically calling the crew, Die was wandering around the restaurants in an idle kind of way, and Kyo had built himself a kind of nest out of coats and bags on the seats and was scribbling away in his notebook. Only Shinya had very rarely flown before – he had been on a plane a few times in his youth, but then his father had fallen ill in a debilitating kind of way that left him not really up to plane travel – but even he seemed to be humouring Toshiya more than anything as he followed him around the various shops, humming appreciatively at the sights he pointed out. They took the escalators up to the sky deck, where you could see planes taking off all around you and Toshiya privately wondered how the fuck they even got up in the air; they looked so slow and so cumbersome and so laboured, wheezing their way up the runway before finally, unbelievably, lifting off into the sky. It was a cloudy day, and the planes only got so high before disappearing into the white. Toshiya hadn't given this much thought before, but now he felt nervous, imagining what it would be like to be above the cloud and in a place where no human was ever properly supposed to be.   
Still. The thought that it was too late to back out now comforted him a little, in the same way that it comforted him when the bar came down on a roller coaster: whatever happened next, be it utopia or catastrophe, it was out of his hands. He was just an observer.   
It was a little different when they actually boarded the plane. Toshiya was bolstered by that point by a couple of beers in the lounge with Die – Shinya having gone to sit beside Kyo and read his book and Kaoru fretfully pacing before the huge plate glass windows – but he still felt a momentary jolt of panic when he saw the inside of the craft; how narrow and cramped it was, the hostesses in their sleek aerodynamic uniforms, the flimsy little belt buckles that were supposed to keep him safe.   
'Do they really do anything?' he asked Die nervously, and his bandmate patted him on the shoulder.   
'Sure. They're only in case of turbulence or whatever.'  
'Turbulence,' Toshiya repeated, mystified.   
'It's like being on the sea,' Shinya said from behind him in his low, calm voice. 'The air has currents, too. Sometimes the plane gets caught in one, and it gets thrown around a bit.'   
In the middle of the aisle, Toshiya froze. 'You've got to be fucking kidding me.'  
'It's not that bad,' Die said, making a violent hand gesture at Shinya.   
'Of course not,' the drummer said melodically. 'But in case it is, the belts are there to tether your mangled corpse to your chair, so they can identify your body by your seat number.'  
'Shinya!' Die said, outraged. The drummer just shrugged.   
'You all tease me all the time,' he said loftily. He pushed past Die and made his way into his assigned seat, unpacking his book as soon as he was settled in. Feeling nauseated, Toshiya dropped into place beside him, and Die took the aisle seat. Kaoru and Kyo were seated a couple of rows behind them: Toshiya could hear the vocalist grousing about who got the window.   
He found himself wishing, very hard, that Kaoru had been seated next to him. Not that he thought the other man would be that much comfort, but just...  
_What_, he asked himself sarcastically, _you want to be next to him when you die? Take his hand in your final moments? Swear your undying love as you go plummeting into the Sea of Japan? _  
Well, yes. But when you put it like that, it sounded stupid.  
He leant his head back and closed his eyes. The feeling of panic kept rising and then flattening within him, like some viscous liquid building up in his stomach. His heartbeat fluttered in a way that was uncomfortable; his chest felt weirdly compressed.   
'How do they get air in?' he asked Die, opening his mouth as little as possible, but the guitarist just gave an unhelpful shrug.   
'No idea.'  
Toshiya closed his eyes. 'Great.'   
  
After all his anxieties, though, the flight passed uneventfully. He was, honestly, a little frightened when the plane took off – the sound of the engine straining was alarming, as though it couldn't cope, and then he wasn't ready for the plane to bank at such a sharp angle – but when they were actually aloft, there was very little sense of being airborne. It was almost disappointing, except that his mind kept reminding him that there was only a strip of carpet and then a narrow crunch of metal between him and miles and miles of empty sky.   
It must be normal for everyone who flew to picture their body falling. Funny what a dear thing a body became in that context: no matter how you might have hated it, criticised it, torn it apart in life, it became something so precious when vulnerable. Everyone was beautiful when they were on their way down.  
The landing made his ears pop, and he was still rubbing at them resentfully as they regrouped in baggage claim at the other end, surrounded everywhere by little signs of China, the language babbled around them unknown.   
'How did you find it?' Kaoru asked, smiling at him tiredly.   
'I could have done without the pilot telling us how high up we were,' Toshiya admitted, but he smiled back. 'No, it was cool. You know what was weird?'  
'What?'  
'The sky, when you're up there. It's just...being above the clouds. And the sky,' he shook his head, 'It's so big. _So_ big. And I know I should have expected that, but I didn't.'   
Kaoru nodded. 'It reminds me of that Kate Bush song, _The Big Sky_. It's...'  
And as Toshiya watched, his face changed. His smile faded, so slowly it was almost imperceptible; his eyes grew wide and dark and frightened.   
'Kaoru?' Toshiya asked, reaching out for him in concern, but Kaoru pulled his arm away.  
'It was the song that was playing,' he said in a low, careful voice, 'At your place. That night.'  
The nauseated feeling was suddenly back, stronger than ever. And it was weird: Toshiya _felt_ himself go pale, every last drop of blood trickling away from his stupid, dumbstruck, foolish face.   
'Yeah,' he mumbled, not moving his lips.   
'I remember,' Kaoru said. It wasn't clear whether he was talking to Toshiya or to himself. 'I remember everything,' he said again.   
Toshiya blinked, and felt a tear fall down his cheek.  
'I remember, too,' he whispered.  
All around them was the chatter of Mandarin, the clicking of high heels, the endless courteous dictate of the loudspeaker. Kaoru looked at him, once, hurt. He looked so hurt that Toshiya felt helpless. To be only one person, in the face of all that agony.   
'You lied to me,' the guitarist said, his voice numb-sounding and unlike himself.   
'Yes,' Toshiya said, but his throat tightened painfully and his breath caught in his chest and he did little more than mouth the word.   
Kaoru pressed the heels of his hands hard to his temples. He had the look of somebody who could not close their eyes, as if in a nightmare; his dark gaze kept searching Toshiya's face helplessly.  
And he kept expecting Kaoru to turn his back and walk away from him, but he didn't. Instead the guitarist remained standing before him, perhaps waiting for an explanation that Toshiya, heart racing, lungs constricting, could not possibly give, and they stayed like that until all the bags were picked up and they were collected by their tour manager and shepherded out into the noise and bustle and excitement of Shanghai.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot seems to happen in this chapter, now I'm looking at it again. 
> 
> No comments apart from: hey, I'm feeling a little blue at the moment. If you're reading and enjoying this, consider saying hi. It'll make my day.


	31. Chapter 31

At least you couldn't say that Kaoru was angry with him. Not exactly.   
It was weird, but when Toshiya looked back on that first time in Shanghai years later, it all seemed to be a blur. When he eventually watched back the footage that'd been shot of them just wandering around the city, it felt like he was watching somebody else: who was that scrawny young man acting all cool, perching on a low stone wall in a foreign place? Could he really have forced himself to smile at the camera, tease Shinya, laugh at jokes?  
It seemed he must have done, but inside, all he remembered feeling was numb. Occasional memories came back to him in odd little flashes – the radio in their rented minivan stuck on some last nineties pop station playing _Don't Talk Just Kiss_; the venue being swarmed and the police being called; a glimpse of Shinya's hair shining under a green spotlight – but he didn't feel any connection to them. It was as if they had simply been allocated to him, dealt out like a hand of cards.   
He and Kaoru didn't speak for the whole of their time in Shanghai. Not properly, at least. The first night they arrived both he and Kaoru had to succumb to the filming of their group dinner; the guitarist looking, to his credit, only slightly strained: he said he had a bad headache. It might even have been true, too: he kept covering his eyes with his hands and pressing down hard on his temples and rubbing viciously at the back of his neck; classic signs, with Kaoru. Still, when the camera was on him, he didn't miss a beat: he laughed, pulled faces, horsed around with Die. You would have been hard pressed to pick out the tiny signs of tension in the cords of his neck and the white-knuckled way he held his chopsticks, but they were there. If you knew what to look for. If you knew Kaoru.   
He wanted to try to talk to him that evening – had visions, actually, of them maybe getting away from the hotel together, taking a slow walk around the dark streets – but Kaoru was rooming with Kyo, who would have been suspicious. Instead he'd gone with Die and Shinya to a nightclub, where the idea was that Die was going to try out some of his phrasebook Mandarin on the unsuspecting locals (a doomed endeavour from the start; they spoke a different dialect here). Die made a fool of himself to a backdrop of throbbing techno; Shinya noted in musing tones that the nightclub seemed very fancy, and everyone was very flashily dressed; Toshiya stood at the bar and drank watery Tsingtao beer until he thought it'd make him sick, at which point he swapped it for glasses of an oily clear alcohol that he couldn't identify because he'd ordered it in gestures. It probably should have tasted vile, but his senses didn't seem to be working too well. When he picked up the glass his fingers felt blunt and clumsy and unrelated to him; the music was a distant throb in his ears and the people wandering past him in their tight short outfits may as well have been ghosts: they seemed just that vague, that undefined around the edges.   
They got back to the hotel around three, and Toshiya was drunk enough to fall asleep straight away. He awoke around ten with an oppressive headache and a seasick sort of feeling, but it was time to start his day. When he saw Kaoru, the guitarist had the benumbed, white-faced look of somebody who hadn't slept.   
  
They were in Hong Kong before they got to speak properly. It seemed crazy when Toshiya looked back on it: a whole week in Shanghai, those empty hours at the airport, all those nights one or another of them might have slipped away; they really found no opportunity? It was only later that he realised the obvious: that he had been too scared. That Kaoru had been avoiding him.   
In Hong Kong, though, Toshiya landed the solo room and Kaoru was sharing with Shinya – who might have noticed everything going on around him, but at least had the decency not to question or comment on it – and on their first night there, sitting alone in his room, Toshiya had the very lucid thought that if he didn't talk to Kaoru now, he was likely to go completely crazy. He could feel it happening, too: all through the past week he'd been having strange moments where his heart would suddenly start racing and his ribs would crush around his lungs and he would go cold and sweaty and shaky. The first time it had happened Shinya had asked him if he had a fever; the second time, he'd just slid him a sideways look and brought him a bottle of water.   
He texted Kaoru to come over and meet him before he'd even unpacked or settled in. He gave his room number even though he knew Kaoru knew it; he didn't want to give him any excuses.   
Then he waited, and waited. His pulse was doing a sickening rabbit skip through his veins, and his breathing sounded shallow in his ears. His hands were clammy. When the knock on the door finally came – gentle enough for Toshiya to have pretended he hadn't heard it – and he rose to answer it, he felt oddly like a character in a play, or a marionette: like all of his actions had been decided for him, long in advance.

Kaoru said, 'I can't stay very long,' and Toshiya quirked an eyebrow.   
'Got another secret meeting?' he asked. He was going for gentle, light-hearted; instead his mouth was dry and his throat tight and his words fell flat and heavy, like rocks.   
Kaoru wasn't looking at him. He had his hands shoved into his pockets and his head lowered, like the carpet was the most interesting thing he'd ever seen.  
'Sit down,' Toshiya offered, and Kaoru gave a flinching sort of shrug.  
'No, that's okay.'   
Toshiya swallowed painfully. 'Okay.'   
There was a long, agonising pause. Toshiya couldn't stop looking at the man in front of him; the baggy drape of his clothes, the pale curve of his neck, the sharp line of his jaw. Even after everything, even in such a situation, it was such a luxury to be able to look at his face unobserved: to take in his small, delicately-shaped lips, the carved look of his cheekbones, the unusually western-looking nose that he had always, always found adorable.  
His eyes stung and his vision blurred abruptly. He had to look away.   
Kaoru said, 'Look.'   
He hesitated. His Adam's apple jumped as he swallowed. He stared hard at the floor.   
'Kaoru—'  
'I don't think we should spend any more time together,' the guitarist said abruptly.   
In the silence that followed Toshiya became aware of how noisy Hong Kong was: he was on the twelfth floor and he could still hear the traffic noise, the incessant sounds of angry people trying to get somewhere else. He plastered on a smile.   
'But we work together.'  
'Yes. But it's...' Kaoru gripped at the back of his neck, digging his fingers into the skin, 'I think we should keep it just that. Just work. I don't...I don't think we should be alone together.'   
Quiet.   
'Oh.'  
'It's not...' Kaoru moved, awkwardly, like his body wasn't his own. 'It's not personal. It's just.' He gave a swallow that was more like a grimace. 'The band. You know.'   
'I'm really sorry,' Toshiya said softly. Like he'd thrown something at him, Kaoru flinched.  
Almost without moving his lips he said, 'You don't need to apologise.' He cleared his throat briefly. 'It'll get more natural, I think. If we stop hanging around each other. It'll become normal.'   
'But...' Toshiya foundered, trying to force his throat to work, 'I like hanging out with you.'   
God, it was just so fucking _weak_. He was aware of that as he looked miserably into Kaoru's face; took in his hunched, huddled posture and the dark shadows under his eyes.   
'Yeah,' the guitarist said finally, 'I've liked hanging out with you, too.'   
'So why—'  
'I wish,' Kaoru said shortly, 'you wouldn't make this harder than it is.'   
As he said it, Toshiya's voice from long ago seemed to echo in his head: half-drunk and half-hungover on the floor of their hotel room in Nagano, slurring in dangerous tones, _you make everything so difficult for me_.   
It was only when he compared the Toshiya then to the Toshiya now that he realised how much the other man had grown up; how he'd grown up alongside them, around them. He found the thought almost unbearably touching; felt a melancholy so acute it was almost pleasurable, like pressing down on a bruise.  
And he remembered himself that same night: stroking Toshiya's hair and thinking how pretty he was, how much he looked like a girl. Asking him not to leave. Touching his face.   
'I should go,' Kaoru said woodenly.   
'Wait, just – wait. Please. Can't we _talk_ about this? Kaoru, I – I know it's weird, but we can...we can figure it out.'   
'I already figured it out,' Kaoru said. His nose and eyes were starting to feel sore and his throat was getting dry, his chest tight; he knew if he stood there much longer he was going to go ahead and actually cry in front of the bassist, and he didn't think he could forgive himself for that.   
Add it to the long, long list of things he already couldn't forgive himself for.   
'Sorry,' he managed to say. 'It just has to be like this. It's – Kyo – and the band – it's so _fucked_.'   
He raised his head and tried to give Toshiya a smile. Stupid; stupid to look at him. It sent a pain so sharp through him that he almost doubled over.   
'I need to go,' he said. And he did. That time, Toshiya didn't try to stop him.   
  
It seemed unbelievable to Toshiya, but everything turned out to be okay. More or less.   
They finished their dates in Taiwan and flew back to Japan (he barely noticed the plane flight that time; already it felt ordinary enough to seem faintly boring), where their tour picked up in May: Ichihara, Fukuoka, Nagasaki. The weather got warmer and the air smelled good. Being packed inside a minivan with Kaoru and having to ignore him was more painful than not being around him at all, but only a little. His scale for such things seemed to have overhauled itself: because he no longer hoped for happiness, his emotional spectrum seemed to have narrowed, become duller. In early June Kyo suddenly developed some super-acute mutation of tonsillitis, but even that seemed like a very minor catastrophe compared to what had already occurred. And it made Toshiya feel less angry with Kyo, in the end: seeing him after their show in Kanagawa so white-faced and so anxious and so visibly in pain, so scared for the most valuable part of himself, it was hard to treat him as a real adversary. He was so pale that the silver piercings in his face looked almost black. The fight seemed to have gone out of him, too: when he was in the hospital and Toshiya brought him some little chips of ice to suck on, he accepted them with none of his usual mistrust. Although that could have been the drugs.   
Once he was recovered – the doctor gave him his tonsils in a jar to take home, which pleased him; he kept getting them out in the minivan – they toured through the rest of the month, and then through July. They played two shows in South Korea, which meant more aeroplane rides and more incomprehensible chatter in foreign tongues. Toshiya didn't mind it. It was much easier to not have to be alert all the time; to let the gentle flatness of vowels in Korean simply wash over him.   
Then they were home again, and everything stopped. And it was dull, airless, muggy summer, and the streets felt dead and even the burble of the water from the canals seemed sluggish. The birds in the sky seemed to have been hung there like ornaments, barely flapping their wings. Only the mosquitoes that buzzed around the water at dusk seemed alive. He knew this because he was doing a lot of walking these days, wandering aimlessly around the city. In some ways it reminded him of back when he'd first arrived – he'd spent all his leisure time simply drifting around then, too – but this time he had the sudden sharp pain of encountering a place where he had a clear memory of Kaoru, talking to him or laughing or smoking a cigarette, his scarf drawn up high around his face in winter or his whole body relaxed as it had been last spring, walking close to him. He passed the apartment building in Dotonbori that they'd looked at (the For Sale sign now gone), and he remembered how he'd allowed himself to fantasise, for a brief and stupid moment, that he and Kaoru were a couple of many years who were now settling down together, and he remembered how precise and focussed and in charge Kaoru had been with the estate agent, and the bright, sunny smile he'd given Toshiya afterwards – so unlike him, that smile, so open – and he experienced a wave of longing so intense that it took his breath away.  
  
'Kosuke,' he said. His voice landed flatly.  
'Toshiya. Uh, it's been a while.'   
Toshiya gripped his phone painfully tightly to the side of his face.   
'I bought a new apartment,' he said, trying to keep his voice steady. 'Want to come and see it?'   
There was a moment's silence from the other end of the line.   
'What's going on?' Kosuke asked cautiously, and Toshiya forced a smile onto his face, as though the other man could see him.   
'Nothing. Nothing. I just...you said, when we broke up...that if I ever wanted...'  
'Toshiya, what's going on? You sound _super_ fucking weird. Like, _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ weird.'  
'I—'  
'You sound like you've been crying.'  
'No, I just—'  
'Where are you?' Kosuke interrupted brusquely. A little stumblingly, Toshiya gave his new address.   
'I'll be there in half an hour. If I can get a taxi, I mean. But just – wait for me, all right?'  
Toshiya swallowed nervously. His lips felt entirely numb, he realised.  
'All right,' he said.  
'All right,' Kosuke confirmed, and then hung up. His voice seemed to buzz warmly in Toshiya's ear, authoritative but gentle.   
After that, there wasn't much to do but sit still and wait for him to arrive. It was a warm night but he sat with a blanket draped over his shoulders because it felt like too much trouble to remove it. When the buzzer finally went off – a harsh sound that he couldn't imagine himself getting used to – he had to force himself to move; his limbs seemed to want to lock up. He almost crawled over to the door release button, and pressed it down with stiff cold fingers.   
Then suddenly he was bundled up, blanket and all, like a child. A pair of strong, wiry arms were guiding him up to his feet and a soothing voice was murmuring in his ear, although when he actually tuned into it, it turned out to be just Kosuke muttering _what the hell, what the hell_ over and over. Toshiya barely even had any furniture moved in yet, so they sat on the floor. Kosuke kept looking at him very cautiously, as though he was a bomb that was about to go off.   
'You actually made it on time,' Toshiya said finally, and Kosuke smiled.   
'Yeah, well. Fun to undermine expectations sometimes, isn't it?' He looked a little more relaxed now that Toshiya had spoken, but still guarded. Stretching out his shoulders, he leant back on his hands. 'So. Want to tell me about it, kid?'   
And just that – just that little note of softness in his voice – had Toshiya's vision flooding and his eyes and nose stinging. He looked away.  
'I really fucked up,' he said, his words coming out strained because his throat felt so tight. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have called. I just...'  
He trailed off, hoping Kosuke wasn't going to make him explain himself, but the other man just waited. He inhaled sharply; his breathing was out of rhythm.  
'Something happened with Kaoru and I,' he said weakly, 'Before the tour. And – we were both really drunk, and the next day he didn't remember, so I...I lied to him. I said nothing happened. But then he remembered.' He took another unsteady, gulping breath, feeling his head spin horribly, 'And now – now he won't talk to me. He's not _angry_ but – he says it's better if it's just work. He won't even look at me.' He looked up at Kosuke, red-eyed. 'I sucked him off,' he said, almost whispering. 'And he – used his hand on me.'   
If Kosuke was surprised, he didn't show it. He simply remained silent for a moment longer and then asked, 'Can I smoke in here?'   
'Sure.'   
It was quiet while he lit up, just traffic noise coming in through the open windows.   
'Did he say why?' Kosuke asked next.  
'Just that – it was better for the band, this way.'  
'Mm. That's a good reason.' He took a thoughtful drag of his cigarette. 'But it's not the _real_ reason. Bullshit.'   
'I don't care what the reason is,' Toshiya said quietly. 'I just want him to look at me. I want everything back the way it was.'  
'The way it was,' Kosuke asked delicately, 'Or different?'  
'He was my best friend,' Toshiya said. Saying it aloud hurt in a way he hadn't prepared himself for, but strangely, once the initial burn had dissipated, he felt a little better. When he swallowed, his throat felt less clogged. 'I never understood it, you know. When people say that they're “just friends”. _Just_ friends. _Just_, like it's _nothing_ being somebody's friend, but it's not. There's nothing small about it. There's nothing _minimised_ about being someone's friend. You have to choose it, and it's hard. Loving them even when you don't have to; even when it's difficult. It's not..._nothing_. And I—' his voice cracked, 'I really miss it. I need it.'   
He looked up at Kosuke, tried for a smile and a shrug. 'I'm really, _really_ fucking lonely.'   
A little sadly, the other man smiled back. 'Think I can do anything about that?'   
'I bought a bed, but I don't have it set up yet.'   
'The floor is fine.'   
Kosuke kissed him, gently, on the mouth. He cast about for an ashtray and, when he couldn't see one, simply pitched his cigarette elegantly out the window.  
'What do you want?' he asked, and Toshiya closed his eyes.   
'Just tell me what to do,' he murmured. 'Decide for me. Anything.'   
'Okay. You better get started by taking off those clothes.'   
He did. He stripped off and got in the positions Kosuke asked of him, accepted touches on the parts of his body that were required, took what was given. It was a relief to be told; to feel like whatever happened, it couldn't possibly be his fault. He let Kosuke fold into him like a shadow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys. Thanks everyone who said hello on the last chapter; it really cheered me up. Peace.


	32. Chapter 32

Shinya's friend was cute. Really cute, with bright, clear eyes and a tiny smattering of freckles over her nose and cheeks, as fine as cinnamon dust. Her name was Hibiki and so they bonded over that, at first: both having unisex names. Hibiki said that her reaction, in high school, was to have become exaggeratedly feminine, squealing at spiders and worms and painting her nails in pastel shades and always wearing mascara. On the day they met for their blind date, though, she was wearing a pair of loose linen dungarees in a neutral buff sort of colour, and her shoes were flats and her nails unpainted. Her hair was pulled up into a topknot and the white insides of her arms bore forgotten smears of paint, which she apologised for when she noticed them: like many of Shinya's friends seemed to be, she was part of some feminist guerilla art collective who lobbied for equal representation in galleries and created huge public installations.  
'The funny part is that I mostly paint and sculpt insects, now. I have to study them pretty closely to make the artwork accurate, but they're quite sweet when you get up next to them. I mean they have their little habits and their ways, just like any animal.'  
She wrinkled her nose. 'So that's how I spend my time,' she declared, 'Wrangling cockroaches for the greater good.'  
'Somebody's got to do it,' Kaoru said gravely, and she laughed. Not a delicate laugh, with her hand over her mouth, but an ironic sort of snort. She signalled the waiter and ordered a beer, which she drank the first half of with so much enthusiasm she got froth on her upper lip.  
Kaoru wondered why Shinya didn't want this woman for himself, but pushed the thought out of his head. Shinya had always had an infuriating habit of befriending very pretty, very available women, and then blinking in confusion when you told him so. (_'Mari? She's nice. She plays the cello; I think that's really cool.'_)  
And then stopping the conversation, after missing your point entirely. It had been a painful and somewhat humiliating process, asking Shinya to set him up on a date – he'd had to spell out his request so clearly that he almost felt he'd been a little vulgar about the whole thing – but he had to admit, the drummer had delivered. Hibiki was nice, and pretty, and interesting. He liked her arms and how expressive she was with her hands. When she pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and Kaoru went to light it for her, she gave a delighted sort of laugh – 'that's so old-_fashioned!_' – but leant into the flame he was offering. He liked her, he thought.  
But he tried to imagine himself kissing her or sleeping with her, and found that he couldn't. The figures were all blurred; they changed unreliably, flattening curves and airbrushing out breasts. Ironic, really: before, he'd been so unable to picture how two men would have sex; now, he seemed to be having the same problem with women.  
He wondered why he couldn't get it right even when he was trying.  
The thought should have made him feel sad, but instead he just felt exhausted.  
'Um. Hello?'  
He awoke abruptly to find her peering into his face in a curious kind of way.  
'Sorry. I guess I spaced out a bit.' Kaoru shook his head quickly. 'Sorry. That was really rude.'  
She gave him a smile that he couldn't quite place the meaning of, resting her chin in the cup of her hand.  
'Shinya says you work too much,' she said. 'Maybe it's true.'  
'I suppose I'm not very good at blind dates. My first impression is rarely a good one.'  
'Well, I'm not mortally offended yet. You know, Shinya didn't really give me much to go on, when he told me about you. The only details I really got were that you're the guitarist, and you compose a lot, and that he's seen you read _The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea_ twice. That's it. For a band, you guys don't seem to speak to each other very much.'  
'Well, he's wrong. I've actually read it three times.'  
She laughed. Kaoru had a headache.  
  
He couldn't really tell what was wrong with the date. It wasn't boring; they were getting along well; the food was fine.  
Still, something simply wasn't right, and it made them awkward with each other. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was waiting for it to finish, rather than anything else, and he could tell that she knew he was distracted. When he went to pay their bill, she was quite firm about splitting it. He decided that if he ever reached the point in his life where he wanted a painting of a cockroach on his wall, he would buy it from her.  
'I don't suppose we'll be seeing each other again,' Hibiki said at the end of their date, and it had been such a crashing failure that, rather than being humiliated, Kaoru simply felt relieved that she was willing to acknowledge it. He gave her a tired smile.  
'Sorry. For my part, it's not you. I'm just not ready for this.'  
'Probably shouldn't have been asked to be set up, then,' she said smartly, but not angrily. She was just stating a fact: she shrugged at him, her shoulders bright in the sunshine.  
'Frankly, you're really cool. I think you can do better than me.'  
'I guess I should have let you pay for lunch after all,' she teased. 'Well, anyway, it's not every day I go on a date with a rock star.'  
'Generally we're a boring group.'  
'Not Shinya. He's a _freak_.'  
It startled a laugh out of him, even though he felt so tired he thought he might simply collapse onto the pavement.  
'You've got a nice smile. I might be inviting you on a second date if I'd seen it a little more.'  
'Noted,' Kaoru said. 'Thanks for humouring me.'  
'Yeah, well. Good luck getting over your ex, I guess.'  
'My ex?'  
She gave him a puzzled look. 'Oh. Sorry. You said you weren't ready, so I just...assumed.'  
'Oh,' Kaoru hastily back-pedalled, 'My ex. No, of course. Right. Thank you.'  
Hibiki hailed a taxi with a pale flash of her arm, and then paused to look at him as she opened the door.  
'I bet she's a strange girl,' she said finally, and then tucked herself away out of sight, and in time her cab had merged so completely with the mid-afternoon traffic that it was indistinguishable from any of the others.

After Hibiki left, Kaoru didn't know what to do with himself. He was alone on a crowded pavement in the glaring sunshine, the day wincing in and out around him like a migraine. He could smell the canal in summer: the metallic smell of cool water and then the fug of whatever fumes or fuels those tourist boats spewed out, the organic odours of algae and duck shit. Every person who politely stepped around him on the pavement seemed to be wearing perfume or cologne or giving off the sweetish smell of sunblock. He thought, for a single panicked moment, that he might throw up the reasonably expensive French meal that he'd just eaten all over the street.  
He swallowed hard and made himself walk. One foot in front of the other. Toshiya lived around here now, he knew, in a small building sandwiched between the Kizu river and a tree-lined park with a pond and a baseball diamond, currently dry and dusty and dazed with heat like everything else.  
He wished they were on tour again. At least on tour he was distracted.  
On tour, he got to see Toshiya every day.  
He missed the bassist more than he could say, but it was an odd kind of missing because he knew that he had no right to it. This was his own mess, his own fault. He understood that.  
But still: he would see something interesting and, before he could stop himself, think _Toshiya would love that_. Or _ I have to tell Toshiya about that_. When he listened to their rough cuts for their next album he lingered over Toshiya's parts, playing and replaying sections that featured him more prominently, thinking: he actually made that sound. His fingers plucked those strings and made that noise; it's all him. He remembered feeling similarly on a childhood holiday to Italy, taking in the ruins and thinking that ancient hands had touched this stone; this stone that he was now touching. It just didn't seem real.  
He waited daily for the morning he would wake up without thinking, _something's missing._  
And then the dull, aching thud of the truth: _it's Toshiya. _  
What had he _done_ with his life, before the other man had pushed his way into it? It was as though Toshiya had not just come into his life but had changed it, had pulled it in around him and moulded it to his form: his legs, his shoulders, his beautifully hinged hips. He had made an impression into which nobody else would fit.  
And of course, Kaoru couldn't sleep.  
It was worse than ever.  
  
He recorded his efforts, morning after morning: two hours this night, one hour this night, two and a half, one, just half an hour, forty minutes, three hours. Gradually the world started to neglect its basic shape; to blur around the edges. Shapes shimmered and swam; trees fogged out to fill the horizon; water crystallised into diamond-bright little shapes, cut up like confetti, sharp-edged. Sensations changed, as though his skin had become covered in a thin layer of rubber; food didn't taste quite right any more. He drank a lot of coffee and smoked a lot of cigarettes. When he thought that the coffee might be the problem he switched to just plain water, but it tasted like metal. In the studio his guitar grew extra surfaces and textures, and his bandmates' occasional words to him sounded like they were coming from under the sea.  
It was Die who sat down next to him on the sofa one day though – dropped right down next to him, like it was something casual – and nudged him in the ribs with a sharp elbow and said, simply: 'Hey.'  
'Hey.'  
He seemed determined not to look at Kaoru; he focussed his gaze on his own lap as if there was something incredibly important there that was taking up all of his attention.  
'So,' he said after a moment, 'What's, uh. Wrong.'  
'Pardon?'  
When Kaoru moved his head too quickly he felt it swimming, as if to catch up with him. He blinked his aching eyes.  
'You don't look great right now.'  
'Thanks, Die.'  
'No, I mean...' the other guitarist blew a sigh upwards into his fringe, 'What's up with you? You're all...' he gave a half-shrug, extending his neck awkwardly, '_sad_.'  
That got Kaoru's attention.  
'I'm not sad,' he said, very abruptly.  
'Kaoru,' Die said patiently.  
'Really, I'm not. I just can't sleep.'  
'Something on your mind?' Die said meaningfully, and Kaoru frowned.  
'No. I have insomnia.'  
'So you just can't sleep for, like, _no_ reason.'  
'It's a medical condition, Die; sometimes it just happens,' Kaoru retorted waspishly, and the other man feel silent, broodingly studying his own knees again.  
'We've been worrying about you.'  
'Great.'  
'I'm _serious_,' Die said forcefully. 'You've not been right since China, and everyone can see it. You act happy when the cameras are on you and then as soon as they're off and you think nobody's watching, you go back to looking so fucking _miserable_.'  
Kaoru shifted uncomfortably. He hadn't known Die had been watching him so closely.  
'It's just sleep,' he said lamely, 'Just – it's been going on for a while. It gets me down. But it's fine.'  
Die made a frustrated noise. For a few moments they sat there in silence, Die's shoulders tense and Kaoru's hands clasped tightly in his lap. They didn't feel like they belonged to him; they felt very distant. His whole body could have been floating, a few inches off the sofa.  
'Toshiya's sad, too,' Die said finally, very quietly.  
'Oi.' From the open door frame Kyo was standing half-in, half-out of the room, his shoulders thrust decisively forward. 'A few of the mixes for _Drain Away_ have gone, and I need them.'  
'Why?'  
'Thought I'd shove them up my ass and dance around a bit. Why d'you _think_?'  
Kaoru took a deep breath and tried to count to ten – a tactic that had worked with Kyo in the past – but the numbers kept blurring in his mind and he came up confused. He forced himself to concentrate.  
'Last time I saw them, they were being played back in the guitar booth. Die's booth, I mean. The one he uses.'  
Kyo regarded him appraisingly.  
'You look like shit. You should get some sleep.'  
'Oh, I hadn't thought of that, thanks.'  
Kaoru's tone was borderline aggressive, but to his credit, Kyo just rolled his eyes.  
'Why do you need them, anyway?' Die asked curiously. 'I thought you already had the lyrics down. Didn't you already record for it?'  
'I do, and I did, but everyone seems to have pretty much decided on using Mix 3, and the rhythm section's different than what I was working with. I was thinking about it last night, and I want to try singing over it.'  
Kaoru struggled to sit up straighter. 'You think you want to rerecord your vocals?'  
'Maybe. Or figure out something with the bass, I guess.'  
'Have you talked to Toshiya about it? Oh.' Kaoru lowered his eyes. 'I guess not.'  
There was an uncomfortable silence and then Die said, 'Well that's fucking stupid.'  
It might have been Kaoru's imagination, but the atmosphere in the room seemed to grow almost imperceptibly tighter. Kyo's cheeks coloured slightly, but he just shrugged, looking down at the floor.  
'Well, we need it finished,' Kaoru said, trying to strengthen in his voice, 'So I suggest you talk to Toshiya and figure it out between you.' He paused. 'I like your vocal cut a lot, so unless you think you can do it better, it might be worth altering the bass line.'  
'Hm.'  
'But the different mixes are all in Die's recording booth,' Kaoru reiterated, feeling surer now. 'That's where I last saw them.'  
Kyo just made a non-committal sort of noise, and left them alone. Through the warren of glass dividers and half-walls in the studio, they watched him make his way to Die's usual recording booth, his shoulders hunched in a way that made him look defensive, and very small.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for all your wonderful support, everyone!


	33. Chapter 33

By eight o'clock that evening, it was just the two of them left in the studio. It was like a horror film, Toshiya thought. One of those horror films where the monster stalks the victims around a haunted house, and picks them off one by one: first Die, and then Shinya, and then Kaoru.  
They sat on opposite ends of the sofa, more or less facing each other; Kyo sitting on the arm with his feet curled neatly between the cushions and Toshiya with his legs crossed in front of him, his bass resting uneasily on his lap. The vocalist's face was a mask of concentration and there was a muscle working away in his jaw, giving the impression that he had two heartbeats working away in his throat.   
'It's from about thirty-five seconds in,' he said in his low, gruff voice, 'That I think we might have a problem. Where the bass starts to bounce like that.'   
'Bounce?' Toshiya repeated lightly, and something contracted in Kyo's throat.   
'Bounce. Yes.' With admirably steady hands, he rewound the CD and played the track again. 'There. That's the moment you'll be bouncing around on stage. Dipping your head. You look like a bird when you do that.'   
Understandably, Toshiya didn't know quite how to respond to Kyo's statement, and so he said nothing for a few moments. He fingered the frets of his bass mechanically; a soothing sort of motion. It gave him courage: the sturdiness of his instrument, how competently his hands moved over it.   
'I like the bass being prominent there,' he said as reasonably and politely as he could, 'If you're going to have that high note just beforehand. I think it balances it out.'   
Kyo was silent for a moment.   
'I agree,' he said at last, surprising Toshiya. 'So.'   
'So.' Toshiya struggled to make himself think clearly, 'Uh. What if we actually extended it a little, that sora bit? So you hold the note longer instead of having to chop it off?'  
'Hm.'  
'We could do the same with the kowareta in the next bit.'   
'Like – ko-waaa.'   
'Yeah. To match the long  _ra_ on sora.'  
'That could work,' Kyo said guardedly.   
With awkward, disjointed movements, he took out the CD they'd been listening to and slid in the same mix without the vocals. Determinedly not looking at Toshiya, he sang it through with the longer notes substituted, and then paused the CD.  
'That's better,' he said finally. 'Than the original, I mean. I prefer it.'   
'Me too. Great. So...' Toshiya gave a jagged sort of shrug, 'Good. I'm out of here, if you don't mind.'  
'If you stick around and run controls for me, I can record it tonight and everyone can listen to it tomorrow.'   
Halfway through getting to his feet, Toshiya hesitated.   
'Are you seriously asking me for a favour?'   
'Yep.'   
'What, so when you need my help, I'm suddenly  _not_ disgusting?'  
'I don't think you're disgusting,' Kyo said tightly, 'I just think you're weak.'  
  
There was a beat of noxious silence, as if some poisonous gas had started to leak into the room and neither of them wanted to open their mouths to draw a breath.  
' _Weak_ ,' Toshiya repeated in acid tones, feeling his cheeks start to burn.   
'You act,' Kyo said in that same stiff voice, 'Like you're the first person in the world to ever have feelings like you do, and you're so in thrall to it all; like you just can't help yourself. You don't even  _try_ to fight it.'   
'Try to fight...being gay?' Toshiya said incredulously.   
'Like it's your  _only_ option. Like you couldn't just – keep it to yourself, or make something else work, or just do  _anything_ to push back against it. That's what makes me sick. I  _hate_ it,' he concluded violently.   
Toshiya stared at him for a moment. 'That's fucking insane,' he said clearly.  
'It's not  _insane_ ; it's what men do. Real men.'  
'I  _am_ a real man,' Toshiya said exasperatedly, and Kyo snorted.   
'You really think so.'   
'Yeah, I do, actually. God, you are so fucked  _up_ ,' Toshiya said softly. 'You know what you sound like? It's like – like when people start talking about pushy people in Tokyo and Osaka and the big cities and how they're not like  _real_ Japanese. Like any part of the country is more real than any other.'  
'It's nothing like that.'   
'It's exactly like that! Why is one man more real than any other man?!'   
'That's just the way it is!' Kyo fired back. 'You're supposed to be better than this stuff;  _stronger_ than this stuff. You're supposed to be the one in control, but instead you let everything you feel control  _you_ . Fucking  _pining_ all the time over Kaoru even though he's  _never going to want you_ .'  
Toshiya's bass slipped a little in his hands, and he gripped at it tightly.   
'You're in love with a man,' he said.  
Kyo's only response to that was a look of incredible disgust.  
'Aren't you,' Toshiya said, gentler – he'd realised his voice the first time around had been quite abrupt and shrill – 'you're in love with a man.'   
'Don't be so fucking vile.'  
'Kyo, it's  _okay_ .'   
'Go and fuck yourself.'   
'Who is it?' Toshiya asked quietly, and Kyo performed a movement that was something between a shrug and a flinch. He clamped his jaw closed and held it that way for a long time, but Toshiya made himself wait. It was weird: he could see the vocalist inspecting his hands, clenching them into fists, looking between them and Toshiya, them and Toshiya, weighing up whether or not to hit him. Like watching him rapidly change form: flesh to stone. Flesh to stone. Flesh to stone.  
'Does it matter?' Kyo muttered finally. Gaze lowered, he answered his own question: 'It doesn't fucking matter.'   
Funny: it wasn't the victory it might have been. Instead, Toshiya's chest started to feel weird – a sort of caving-in feeling, a collapsing sensation, that made his stiff, hostile posture crumple down into something weaker.  
'How long for?' he asked, and Kyo was quiet again.   
'Long time,' he said finally.   
'And is he...?'  
'No,' Kyo snapped, 'Of course not. Don't be fucking stupid.'   
'But is he – the first man, that you've ever...?'  
Kyo's eyes could have cut him to shreds. 'He is the only man,' he enunciated clearly, almost snarling, 'I am not joining your  _club_ ; this isn't some  _coming out _ story. It's an accident. It's all...it's just a mistake. That's all.'   
'I used to think that,' Toshiya said. Moving very carefully, he sat down again on the very edge of the sofa; Kyo gave him a venomous look and made a show of withdrawing from him. 'I used to think it was like ducks, or something. You know the way they imprint on the first thing they see? I used to feel like it had all gone wrong, with me.' He shrugged limply. 'But...then I realised that all that was doing, that kind of thinking, was making me drink too much, and making me miserable.'   
'Not like now,' Kyo muttered acidly. 'Fucking ray of sober sunshine you are these days.'   
'Accepting how I felt,' Toshiya continued doggedly, 'Was the best thing I ever did for myself. Even better than auditioning for your stupid band.'   
Kyo eyed him beadily for a moment, and then looked away.   
'Yeah, right,' he said dismissively. Toshiya just shrugged.  
'You don't have to believe me. But I wish you would.' He bit his lip. 'Don't you want to be...happy, ever? One day?'  
'What, like you are, you mean?' Kyo retorted, faux-polite, and then snorted loudly. 'I'll pass on that, if it's all the same to you.'  
'But—'  
With an exasperated sound, Kyo cut across him: 'I don't want to hear it. You...you're so fucking  _miserable_ , can't you at least acknowledge that? Don't you wonder why that  _is_ ?'  
'I'm not—'  
'You've lost weight,' Kyo told him aggressively, 'You don't look like you're sleeping, and you're drinking too much.'  
Toshiya studied his bass. Its shiny surface was blurred with fingerprints.   
'You think everyone drinks too much,' he said finally, and Kyo made a scoffing noise.   
'You've ruined yourself,' he said. Because Toshiya wasn't looking at him his voice sounded oddly flat and disconnected, like it might have been coming from inside Toshiya's own head. 'And I don't want to end up like you. I'm not stupid enough to want something I can't have.'   
Slowly, like an elderly man, he uncurled his limbs and got to his feet. He stretched out his arms until they made soft cracking noises, and shook off a yawn.   
'Come on,' he said at last, 'I want to get this recorded so I can go home.'   
  
It took almost an hour for them to get the vocal track the way Kyo wanted it. By the time Toshiya left the studio it was after nine and the city was dark and muggy, full of the smells of car exhaust and hot tarmac. It felt as though the pavements had spent the day sucking up the heat just to release it now: the air felt thick and dirty and wet. It made his T-shirt stick to his body and his hair form damp spikes over the nape of his neck.   
He was distracted enough, after everything Kyo had said, to get on the wrong bus: he took the one he'd always used to take, the one that dropped him off outside the Tsutenkaku Tower, a good thirty minutes from his new apartment. He didn't care; he wasn't in any hurry to get home. His new place was too empty; it sort of echoed around him.   
What he really wanted was to just sleep next to somebody. Just to hear somebody else's breathing and the sound of them rustling around in the sheets; to feel a presence next to him, and know that he wouldn't be alone when he woke up. He wanted arms around him, the smell of somebody else.   
With his hands in his pockets, he started walking steadily north. He should have veered left to get back to his neighbourhood but instead, he hesitated outside the entrance to Ebisucho station and then walked in. He bought a ticket using the loose coins in his pocket and rode the Sakaisuji line all the way up to Ogimachi, where he crossed through the park – mostly deserted at this time of night, apart from a few polite, salarymen-type drunks – and then cut down the alley between the elementary and junior high schools, passed by the dance studio and then by a FamilyMart, heading towards the light and noise of Doyama.   
His heart was knocking painfully in his chest, too high up, as though it was trying to escape. His head was buzzing, turning all his thoughts into incomprehensible static. He watched as if from outside himself as he went into a bar and ordered a drink, made eye contact, flirted. He watched himself as he wrapped his arms around somebody and kissed them, let them push him back against a wall, their hand curving around his hip. Such a big hand, so bold and clumsy. Not the hand he wanted, small and precise, gripping him so tightly.   
  
So desperately tightly, as though he might have left. As though he could possibly have walked away, when he was being touched and held and looked at like that; when Kaoru was giving him that sweet drunk gaze, moving his hands through his hair, mumbling his name. As if he could have given that up. As if he would ever have wanted to.  
  
His eyes filled with tears, and he pushed the other man abruptly away.  
'Hey, what's wrong?'   
So indistinct he may as well have been underwater; he shook his head.  
'Are you okay?'   
He heard himself whisper  _I don't want you_ . Had he really said that? Later it seemed he couldn't have done, that he had just pushed his way silently out of the bar, the music pulsing off his skin, but he had a weirdly distinct flesh memory of saying it; of his reddened lips making those shapes and the air coming weakly from his throat, forcing the sounds out over his tongue. He gripped his head as he walked away down the street, and rubbed his hands hard over his face. He swallowed and tasted a stranger in his saliva, which made a horrid sad little noise come from him. He didn't know how he avoided bumping into people; he could barely see. Twice in a row he managed to trip over his own feet, and though he tried to laugh at himself it sounded more like a sob.   
He walked for what felt like miles, and when he looked up, he wasn't at all surprised to find himself standing outside of Kaoru's building. He shouldered his way through the front door and somehow made his way up the staircase, stumbling often, listening to his footsteps echo unevenly. In all this time, why hadn't Kaoru moved from this depressing little place? His hand shook when he knocked on the guitarist's door, and when there wasn't any reply, he fumbled his cell phone from his pocket and dialled Kaoru's number.   
He pressed it hard to the side of his head as it rang.  
'Toshiya?'  
'It's me. I'm outside.'   
Quiet, and some disturbance down the line: the sound of Kaoru standing up, he thought, from his sofa. Putting his guitar to one side. Flattening down his hair.  
'What are you doing here?'  
'Can I come in?'  
'Toshiya, I...it's just not a good idea.'  
Toshiya took a deep breath. ' _Please_ ?'   
Silence. But then the sound of soft footsteps from beyond the door, and the sound of the latch turning, and finally Kaoru's pale, anxious face looking up at him from the darkness beyond.   
  
He had obviously showered not too long ago: his hair was damp around his face, the dyed blond streaked darker by water. He wore pyjama pants and a dark T-shirt so oversized that the sleeves fell almost to his elbows, flapping there baggily. He looked tired and drawn and wary. He looked lonely. He looked so vulnerable that Toshiya wanted to simply wrap his arms around him, but instead he hung back, shoving his hands deep in his pockets so that he wouldn't be tempted.   
'Hi,' he said, trying to smile at him.   
'What are you doing here?' Kaoru asked carefully. It was getting harder to maintain his facial expression, but Toshiya shrugged as light-heartedly as he could. It turned out lopsided and broken.   
'I was just in your neighbourhood,' he explained with a voice that kept trying to crack, 'And I thought...I just...'  
'You shouldn't  _be_ here, Toshiya,' Kaoru said nervously. The bassist's smile wavered, but he forced it to stay in place.   
'I know,' he said, 'But I miss you. And I just...' he felt himself about to cry and so looked quickly upwards, staring fixedly at the door frame above Kaoru's head, 'I just really don't want to sleep alone, tonight.'   
His throat tightened on the last word and it only barely escaped, more breath than speech.   
'Toshiya...' Kaoru ran his hands through his hair agitatedly, the cords standing out in his neck, 'What are you expecting to happen? I can't – we can't  _do_ that.' He swallowed abruptly, his Adam's apple jumping. 'I don't want to do that,' he added.   
Toshiya suddenly felt unable to focus on him too well.   
'But,' he protested, and then didn't have anything else to say. Kaoru looked strained: his face was so white it reflected the sickly yellow of the hall light, making him appear ill.   
'That night was a mistake,' he said, his voice quiet but clear. 'It wasn't meant to happen.'   
'But...Kaoru, you...'   
'I was drunk,' the guitarist said harshly. His hands had made fists in the folds of his T-shirt. 'I was so drunk and we just – shouldn't have done it.' He paused, staring at his feet. 'You know, I wish I hadn't remembered,' he said. 'I really wish that. And I need you to let me just...forget, again.'  
'Why,' Toshiya said, even though his throat felt like it was full of jagged glass. He watched Kaoru look around helplessly, his eyes dark and sad and actually  _wet_ in a way that Toshiya had never seen them before. He sniffed softly, and then hastily scrubbed at his face with the back of his hand. He swallowed hard.  
'Because I can't carry on like this,' he said tightly. 'It's too hard. Toshiya, you can't  _come_ here like this! I don't...I can't trust myself around you. So you have to go. You have to  _go_ .'   
He stepped forward like he was going to push him away, but instead his hands gripped clumsily at his wrists.   
Tight. Like he didn't want him to leave.   
Kaoru kept his gaze directed down at the floor, his eyes hidden by the fall of his hair. His shoulders jolted slightly, once or twice; a sad, shivery movement.   
'Kaoru,' Toshiya said gently, but the guitarist just shook his head.   
'I can't do this,' he said indistinctly. 'It can't happen.'   
Toshiya tried to shrug.   
'But I think I love you,' he said, as lightly as he could.  
There was a long pause.   
'It'll pass,' Kaoru said finally, unsteadily. He must have realised how tightly he was holding on; falteringly, he let go, his hands falling limp down by his sides. 'I met a girl, and I...I fucked it up, but I want to try again. I want to make a go of it.'  
Toshiya's whole face felt numb, he realised.   
'What about me?' he asked woodenly. Kaoru gave another little sniff, swallowed hard again.  
'You can do so much better,' he said, his voice oddly distorted. 'You deserve to do so much better.'  
At long last, he met Toshiya's eyes. 'I'm sorry,' he said softly.   
It felt as though his heart was breaking, but Toshiya tried to laugh. 'No,' he said with difficulty, 'Don't be. It's okay.'  
'You shouldn't come around here again.'  
'Yeah. I know.' He smiled unsteadily. 'I won't. Sorry.'   
Kaoru made a little flinchlike gesture; for a heart-stopping moment, Toshiya thought he was going to reach out for him again. In the end, though, all he did was grab the latch of his front door and grip it hard.   
'Good night,' Toshiya said, sounding like someone else.  
'Good night, Toshiya.' Kaoru didn't sound like himself either.   
Toshiya couldn't remember what happened first: whether he started walking back towards the stairwell, or if Kaoru simply closed the door. He thought, sadly optimistic, that it might be the former. He thought that he couldn't remember the sound of the door latching, and that there had been a small moment, halfway down the corridor, when he had briefly imagined the sound of somebody coming after him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's all hold hands and try not to despise Kaoru too much. Agreed? Lovely.


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're going into the future! 
> 
> If this part of the story was closer to the middle than the end, I might have considered breaking the story into two parts; with it being so close to the end, though, I decided to just write in a two year gap. For some reason I then panicked that the two years that have passed wouldn't be clear, even though it's spelled out pretty clearly, so look: you get this totally redundant author's note. Fantastic. Er, but while I'm here, thanks so much for all your kind support! Everyone who has been reading and commenting has made this story (and by extension, uh, me) feel so loved. So thank you!

When Kaoru looked back on it all – on everything that had happened during the nearly two years that had passed since he'd pushed Toshiya to the side – it seemed as though everything had somehow changed in a moment. It felt almost as if time had not really passed at all: almost as if they had simply been deposited here, in their future, which was now their present.   
An odd way to think, because of course he had the memories of all these things as they'd altered by degrees: the women he'd dated, Hibiki, Rin, Nanami, Sumiko, Yuka, Chouko and the myriad others, the ones who hadn't stayed longer than a few weeks, all coming to him and then leaving him by way of some predestined flow, their faces blurring in and out of distinction; Shinya's caving in and the new pressure from their label now that they were getting to be a Big Deal and the eventual move to Tokyo, uprooting themselves and resettling, recently enough that their new homes were still bare and unfamiliar-feeling; Die getting engaged and the party they'd thrown for him, the fragile look of his bandmates' faces from across a crowded room, and the way Toshiya seemed to be standing slightly separate from them, alone as ever. Interspersed with it all was the rush and push of different cities coming in at them from all angles, the sound of tyres over highway, the hum of an engine. Mountain and flatland and coast. Skies starry and clouded and bright. Time.   
  
In Tokyo, they were even more spread out than they'd been in Osaka; once they'd decided to move, they'd had to find places to live before their tour began in March, and the whole thing felt uncomfortably rushed. Shinya and Kyo had settled not far apart, though not as close as they'd been in Osaka, when they'd shared the same apartment block; in Tokyo they lived a few streets away from each other in Shibuya, close to Yoyogi Park, where Shinya walked his dog every morning. Shinya lived in a squat, white, tidy little building with only two other apartments in it; Kyo lived in a fourteen-storey brutalist place with low, sharp concrete balconies and wood-framed windows and a lot of overgrown shrubbery around. Die had settled in Meguro, close to the canal, in a free-standing little dwelling that had once been two small apartments but which, he said enthusiastically, he and his fiancée were going to knock through to make an actual house. From this Kaoru suspected him of harbouring some kind of paternal plans: he had mentioned in passing, just casually, that their proposed floor layout would have three bedrooms. For the moment it just meant that he lived in a building site, and came into the studio every day cheerfully brushing flecks of whitish dust from his clothing. When Kaoru saw the place, it was little more than a gutted-out shell full of support struts and electrical tape, and Die's intended had greeted him only briefly before happily resuming her work of sledgehammering through a chunk of wall plaster.  
Toshiya's was the only home that Kaoru hadn't actually seen with his own eyes. He knew its neighbourhood, near enough – Sumida, Toshiya had said, and from a few comments he'd made to the others Kaoru gathered that it was near water, though whether that meant the Sumida River or the Kyunaka River or the wider, straighter Arakawa River, closing around the heart of the city like an artery, he wasn't sure. He didn't feel it was his place to ask; his relationship with Toshiya was proper now, cordial, if a little distant. Still, when other people asked the bassist questions, he felt the inside of his mind go still and quiet; felt himself hoarding the tiny bits of information he found. Treasuring them.   
Pathetic.  
Toshiya lived more than an hour away from Kyo and Shinya and Die. Perhaps he lived equally as far from Kaoru, who had chosen a twentieth floor apartment in a towering Roppongi high-rise.  
It felt weird, when he thought about it, to consider that Toshiya effectively lived over on the other side of the city from the rest of them. It wasn't like in Osaka, when even after Toshiya had moved, Kaoru could never walk the little plaza beneath the Tsutenkaku Tower without expecting to see him; could never stop looking for him in the Saturday crowds around Dotonbori.   
By contrast Roppongi seemed sterile and disappointing, like a world somehow bleached of its colour, although Kaoru told himself logically that it was probably just the season: Tokyo in February was bare and stark, the trees leafless and turned so dark from car exhaust they looked black. Every time he entered his fancy apartment building he had to stamp the grey slush from his shoes, and when he walked through his own front door it seemed that the empty glare of the place hit him over and over: the bare, pale walls, the colourless metal frames of the windows, the varnish on his wooden floor reflecting the white sky. Watching the tops of his neighbouring buildings stay solid against a background of drifting grey cloud gave him a feeling similar to vertigo; he spent his time at the windows looking down, instead, watching toy-size cars drift their way down his street, pedestrians striding over the pavement and the little blots of dogs and prams and baggage that followed them.   
Osaka in his memory seemed almost fluorescent, neon-hued and confusing. It seemed flushed with blood, alive with food smells and cartoonish bursts of music from open store fronts. When he dreamt of being back there, Toshiya was always with him. He had only to turn around to find the bassist over his shoulder, exhaling bluish cigarette smoke and smiling, and laughing, and taking his hand or else darting away from him, making Kaoru chase him through the luminous maze of the city.   
  
Their rehearsal space was a basement complex, tucked into a quieter backstreet of Akihabara; they'd had it since the move – around two months – and were only guaranteed it for another few weeks or so, until they went on tour. Maybe that was why Kaoru didn't particularly like it; it felt too temporary. His whole life suddenly felt as though it'd been put on ice and was skidding around uncontrollably: he would have liked, in the centre of it all, to have had some sort of stability.   
Still, it was a big and well-equipped place, not nearly as warren-like as the studio they'd used back in Osaka: this one had seven or so individual practice booths but also a central space with enough room for the whole band to actually spread out as they played together. Kaoru had to admit that was an improvement: no more getting the neck of Die's guitar or Toshiya's sharp elbow in his ribs whenever he so much as adjusted his grip on his own instrument. Still, it had the same sofas: long, low, constructed from the kind of faux leather that squeaked and cracked. Were these just issued to every music studio, or what? Was there some kind of starter pack you could apply for, that contained these precise sofas and, come to think of it, this precise coffee table: some cheap thing covered in a blond wood veneer, gouged deep with the scratches of bands past? And this kind of fluorescent strip lighting, and these same ultra-heavy doors, and the same fuzzy, no-colour carpet.   
Maybe that was why everything appeared to have changed so quickly: because nothing, really, had changed that much at all. Same anonymous studio; same dreams of Toshiya; a better apartment, bigger and brighter and flashier, but equally as empty as any he'd had before: just himself, one small man, rattling around in all that space.   
  
_'All I get is bitter and a nasty little rash, and by the time I'm sober I've forgotten what I've had, and everybody tells me that it's cool to be a cat, cool for cats!'_  
Shinya was no longer the only member of their band who knew all the lyrics to _Cool For Cats_ by heart. Ever since his revelation all that time ago, Die and Kyo had taken it upon themselves to earn the same qualification: now Kaoru heard it at the beginning of every tour as a kind of opening ceremony. Like the passing of the Olympic Torch, he thought sourly, although admittedly with rather less pomp and circumstance; it was a raw, windy day and Die and Kyo's enthusiastic voices were tinny-sounding and lost in the breeze. Their tour bus – another improvement, Kaoru had to concede, on the rattly little minivan they'd used to use – was parked outside of their studio, causing a miniature blockage on the Akihabara side street: cars inched by both cautious and curious, inquisitive faces peering at them from every window. It was March 19th and the beginning of their first tour of the year.  
They didn't even need the bus yet; they were starting their tour in Kawasaki and it barely took thirty minutes to drive door to door from the studio to the venue. Still, for the first time they had a great big bus painted black and splashed over with the name of their band: who was anybody to say they shouldn't use it? It was good for morale, their tour manager had argued. Kaoru privately thought that for Kyo, recluse as he was, and Die, with his fiancée at home, the greater morale boost would have been to sleep in their own beds after the show, but he couldn't argue with the sense of keeping their band and their crew all together in one place.   
He leant against the side of the bus, savouring the last cigarette he was going to be able to enjoy for the next few hours: once they arrived at the venue he generally felt too anxious to smoke until all of their equipment was properly set up and sound checked.   
'Feeling okay?'  
Shinya's melodious voice came floating up from next to him: he'd obviously grown tired of _Cool For Cats_ (further away Kaoru could still hear Die and Kyo singing, their volume steadily rising as if they were competing with each other, '_I'm invited in for coffee and I give the dog a bone, she likes to go to discos but she's never on her own..._').  
'I think want a tattoo,' was what Kaoru said by way of response, thinking aloud. He frowned and gave his head a quick shake. 'Sorry. Yes, fine. You?'  
Shinya gave him a slightly rueful smile. 'Nervous. You know. It's always the same.'  
'Yeah. It feels like you should get used to it, but you never do.'   
'Exactly.'   
  
Shinya leant against the bus next to Kaoru, wrinkling his nose a little at the smell of cigarette smoke. 'Well, I hope you're ready to play _The Final_ every day for a month.'  
Kaoru laughed. 'It's a good performance song for us, I think. Plus, I get a few breaks in it. You know, in case I want to roll up my sleeves, or scratch my nose, or have a smoke or something.' He hesitated. 'It's nice and heavy on the bass.'   
'Toshiya will enjoy that.'  
'Mm.'   
'So you'll be watching Toshiya, then.'   
'What?' Kaoru said sharply. Shinya gave him a very innocent look.   
'I just mean that you'll be keeping a close eye on him. Since the song is so heavy on the bass.'  
Kaoru took a long drag from his cigarette. 'Mm.'  
Shinya paused, his lips pressed softly together. 'You've been watching him a lot in rehearsal,' he said, his tone very neutral. 'Are you worried about him?'  
'No,' Kaoru said, rather more defensively than he meant to. 'I mean – yes. Just, you know. I wasn't sure if he was going to cope well with the move. So.'   
'I meant his playing,' Shinya said.  
Kaoru accidentally swallowed around a mouthful of cigarette smoke; he coughed hoarsely. 'Yeah. Of course. Me too.' He blinked. 'Where is he, anyway?'   
Shinya gave him a soft smile. 'Late.'  
'Has—' Kaoru stubbed his cigarette out hastily against the side of the bus, already fumbling in his pocket for his cellphone, 'Has anybody called him? Is he—'  
'He's on his way,' Shinya said calmly. 'Five minutes, he said.'   
'Oh. Okay.'   
Kaoru sighed heavily through his nose. 'Used to be, I'd rely on Kyo to be late.'  
Shinya's smile wavered a little. 'Well, actually...'   
He looked down, frowning a little: uncharacteristic, for Shinya. He seemed to be struggling with his words for a long, time, too; Kaoru waited as patiently as he could. Years of talking with Shinya had taught him that it was no good to push him.   
'I've been wondering,' Shinya said finally, his words very slow and measured, 'If Toshiya's maybe drinking a bit too much, again.'   
Kaoru was quiet for a moment, trying to control his reaction. 'Oh yeah?' he said at last, quietly. Shinya gave a single nod.   
'It's not any of my business,' he said sensibly, 'But I don't think he did take the move well, actually. He was seeing somebody in Osaka, so—'  
'He was?' Kaoru demanded, and Shinya blinked.   
'Yes.'  
'Was it serious?'   
'Oh. No, I don't think so, really. But—'  
'Oi!' They both turned as one to see Die walking towards them, gripping an embarrassed (and, admittedly, quite hungover looking) Toshiya by the forearm. 'I found a bassist,' he sang, 'Let's get on the bus!'  
'Sorry I'm late,' Toshiya muttered, pulling out of Die's grasp and rubbing at his wrist. 'My alarm...'  
'Don't let it happen again,' Kaoru said firmly. 'Everyone's been waiting.'   
Toshiya raised his eyes to meet his. 'Sorry,' he said, his voice low and hoarse.   
And as always, Kaoru suddenly found it hard to breathe. And as always, Toshiya was the first to look away.   
'All right,' Kaoru said, dry-mouthed. Let's go.'   
  
They played two nights in Kawasaki, two nights in Niigata, and then Toyama. Each night after the show Kaoru lay on his back and watched the numbers change on the digital clock, straining for sleep. Each morning he got up with his body feeling as though it weighed a ton, and before each show he sat down before a mirror and did his best to camouflage the dark circles under his eyes.   
After all the tours they'd undertaken crushed into the back of a minivan, the bus gave Kaoru the airy, not quite secure feeling of having too much room: he found himself unable to sit down for long but instead wandering up and down the aisle, investigating the bus' various features: DVD players, in all the seat backs! Chairs that could recline all the way to become beds, with privacy curtains to draw around them! There was a miniature fridge, and a tiny bathroom tucked away towards the back; the windows were tinted black, which gave the world outside an artificially darkened look, the sky as deep a blue as if it was the height of summer, when in fact the late March weather was overcast and windy and, as they drove into the mountains for their Nagano show, downright _cold_, with a frost that stayed late into the mornings, clinging to the shadows on the ground.   
On the bus, Toshiya was everywhere. Stepping out of the bathroom, or napping curled up in his seat, or opening a beer from the refrigerator with an almost comical expression of concentration on his face. Die had a pack of playing cards and the two of them noisily played snap, their bursts of laughter startling Kaoru's eyes up from the book he'd brought; as they drove closer to Nagano he was kneeling up beside the window with Shinya, pointing out various things and explaining them in his soft, throaty voice. He even got into a press-up competition with Die and Kyo in the aisle, although all three of them lost at once when the bus rounded a corner sharply. As they climbed higher, the roads were full of turns.   
  
In Nagano it was stormy. They arrived the day before their show but the rain was coming down too fiercely for anybody to want to do much; confined to their hotel and a little sick of each other's company by this point, they found themselves drifting apart as much as possible: Kyo immediately curled up on one of the twin beds in the room he was sharing with Kaoru, and Die shut himself up in his private room to place a phone call to his fiancée. Kaoru went down to the lobby to read and maybe drink a beer before dinner, and Shinya was evidently driving Toshiya crazy in their room, because Kaoru hadn't been down in the lobby long at all before he caught sight of the bassist's long legs coming purposefully down the stairwell.  
It was such an uncomfortable feeling, seeing Toshiya when he wasn't prepared for it. He felt awkwardly flushed, as though all the blood had suddenly come rushing back into his veins.   
On impulse he raised his book to cover his face a little, but Toshiya hadn't noticed him. He didn't seem in the right mind to notice anybody; he looked lost, distracted. He wasn't carrying an umbrella or wearing a raincoat or even a jacket, but as Kaoru watched he shouldered his way out of the front door anyway, out onto the rainy street. Cupping his hand against the driving rain, he lit a cigarette.   
Kaoru found himself getting to his feet. He went to the door. Opened it just a little, and stuck his head out.   
'You're going to catch a cold,' he said shortly.   
'Then I guess that's my fate,' Toshiya muttered. The rain was already flattening his hair, and the paper of his cigarette was spotted and streaked; he took a hard pull from it, trying to keep it alive. He waited, and when Kaoru didn't withdraw, gave him a slightly guarded look.   
'I wasn't exactly counting on an audience for this,' he said pointedly, and Kaoru hesitated.  
'Are you drinking tonight?' he asked, too abruptly. The space between them seemed to widen. Toshiya's black T-shirt was sticking to the shape of him.  
'Maybe,' Toshiya said suspiciously.  
'Maybe you should leave it for a night,' Kaoru said steadily. There seemed to a problem with his breathing: it was falling out of rhythm, making his words sound strained.   
Out in the hammering rain, Toshiya smiled, a wry sort of smile that quirked up only one side of his mouth and left his eyes looking as sad as ever. 'I don't know about that,' he said softly. 'Didn't you hear? We're rock stars. Certain behaviour is expected.' He gave a miserable snort of a laugh. 'I don't want to let anybody down.'   
His cigarette had been rained out long ago. He pitched the butt, gave Kaoru a fragile sort of smile, and pushed past him to make his way back to his room.

  
  
  



	35. Chapter 35

In early April, Osaka was coming into bloom.  
It was as if arriving in the place of their origin had broken their spell of bad weather; as they crossed over from Aichi into Mie, and then into Shiga, the sun came out from behind the clouds and filled the bus with butter-coloured light; by balancing precariously on the top of some seats, Die managed to reach up to open the roof hatch a little, and spring-scented air came rushing in.  
'I had no idea they put sunroofs on buses,' Die said, and Shinya gave a very un-Shinya-like snort.  
'It's an emergency exit hatch, Die. But by all means, keep dreaming.'  
Unperturbed, Die simply shrugged. 'In caves all cats are grey,' he said loftily, and Shinya rolled his eyes.  
They arrived in Osaka in the early afternoon. It was lucky that their show wasn't until tomorrow and that they had no actual obligations that day, because Kaoru didn't think he could have controlled them if he tried: he became, in the space of an hour or so, the official leader of Japan's giddiest rock band. Even Kyo pressed his face up against the window disconcertingly, cackling with satisfaction when they drove past something or other that had meaning to him – a gym he used to frequent, or something. At the hotel it was like corralling a bunch of children: once they had their keys in their hands and their bags flung into their rooms, there was no herding them. Standing inside his own private room, Kaoru took a deep breath and just stood for a moment, letting the silence ring softly in his ears.  
He remembered this day two years ago: the week when the city had belonged, just briefly, to him and Toshiya alone. When they'd walked in the Castle Park and gone record shopping, eaten together, drank together. He remembered the neon lights reflecting off the canal and onto Toshiya's face, covering him in multi-coloured ripples; he remembered how he'd laughed, wriggling his fingers in the light. Luminous, almost, from the inside out.  
He pushed his cellphone and his room key into his pocket. He knew exactly where in this city he wanted to revisit.  
  
Inside of Toshiya's chest there was a weird feeling, a sort of fluttering, something like a frantic little bird wanting to be free.  
It amazed him, how much this city felt like home. Or not like _home_ exactly, but still nostalgic in a way that made him ache, like some sort of touchstone from early childhood: an elementary school classroom, a treehouse, a secret patch in the woods that a six year old could stake a claim to.  
He wandered, going nowhere in particular. Their hotel was located over on the east side of the Tennoji Park, so he walked through there first, stopping to bow at the shrine; from there he skirted around the entrance to the zoo and made his way towards the great beacon rising from the ground that had first welcomed him to Osaka and then stayed by him, lit his way home after a dozen drunken nights when he was too late for the trains and too poor for the taxis: the Tsutenkaku Tower, dull in the daytime, the plaza beneath its mighty legs thick with people in their springtime clothes.  
He wondered how many times he'd stepped off the bus here, and never appreciated it; how many times he'd had Kaoru beside him, or behind him, or before him, and never appreciated that, either. The sheer number of times he had taken that bus journey with Kaoru and yet never spoken to him stuck in his throat now: how could he have been so stupid, so wasteful? How could he have believed that the luxury to talk to Kaoru, to only Kaoru, alone, could last forever?  
He changed his direction and started north, up past Ebisucho station. There was the turn-off he would have had to go down to get to Kaoru's place; Kaoru's weird, awkward, ugly building with the lift that he had never trusted. The urge to make the turning was a strong one, but there was nothing there for him, he knew: somebody else would be living in that apartment, now. They, or an industrious landlord, would have painted or repapered over the bleached spaces Kaoru's posters had left on the walls. They would have their bedroom arranged differently, without Kaoru's blackout curtains; the living room would be altered, his lumpy, errant-spring sofa finally confined to the city dump.  
Namba was busy, stifling. People skirted by him with armfuls of shopping; it must have been the first day of good weather here, too, because even though it was just a normal Wednesday there was a festival atmosphere in the air. He watched a whole line of tiny schoolchildren in sun hats and high visibility vests – Toshiya hadn't known that you could buy them in such small sizes – cross the road, shepherded by their guardians, and gather into a neat bundle on the other side. A woman walked past with four very small dogs on leads, their paws scrabbling frantically against the pavement.  
There were times when humans seemed to him like such an absurd race of beings. Looking around at the other people on the streets, going about their days, he couldn't say why he felt so profoundly moved.  
He continued up through Namba, smelling the canal on the air. When he came out at Dotonbori, he was amazed by the sense of deja vu that hit him; he had spent a lot of time here, of course, but he hadn't realized how every detail of the place had sunk into him. Hands shoved into his pockets, he strolled slowly down along the canal. He stopped to watch the occasional boat chug past him through the water, chattering away tourist information in a variety of tongues, each as incomprehensible as the last. Everybody seemed to have some place to be; people pushed by, the wheels of bicycles flashed. Only one other person seemed to be standing still, drinking in the place. Toshiya shaded his eyes.  
His heart skipped.  
'Kaoru?'  
  
The sun went briefly behind a cloud, and Toshiya shivered. The guitarist remained staring out over the water, his shoulders squared a little against the breeze and his hair blowing around his neck and shoulders; it reminded Toshiya, all over again, of the fact that he'd cut his long black ponytail off. He hadn't said anything about it; had simply come into the studio one day with it gone.  
He had wondered at the time, as he wondered now, what Kaoru had done with it. Kept it, donated it to charity, simply thrown it away?  
Selfishly, he had wished for some. He had thought of the way that long dark hair would smell, the way it would run through his fingers, and his stomach had hollowed out with longing.  
'Kaoru,' he said again, moving forward to touch his arm; as soon as he did, Kaoru jumped, and he regretted it. What had he been thinking about? He had rarely seen the other man look so distant, so – _not there_, somehow. He took a step back, as if to prove that he meant no harm.  
'Toshiya.' Kaoru was blinking at him rapidly, apparently disoriented. 'Sorry, I – I didn't expect...'  
'No. Me neither.' He shrugged a little uncomfortably. 'Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you.'  
'No.' Kaoru gave him a miserable sort of smile, 'It's fine.'  
The silence seemed to widen like a gulf, each of them suspended on a different shore. Toshiya forced a smile onto his face.  
'I guess you felt like reminiscing, too.'  
'Yeah. Something like that.'  
Toshiya hesitated. 'I can go,' he said. 'I'll just...I'll go. Sorry.'  
'No.' Kaoru's expression faltered, and he ran a hand through his hair. 'It's the kind of place where – I don't think I can really remember it properly, without you here.'  
Toshiya didn't know quite what to say to that. He took his sunglasses out of his pocket, thinking it might be easier if his eyes were hidden, but ended up just unfolding and then refolding them, and tucking them away. It felt safer to look at the water than Kaoru, so he did that. He stared at it until it blurred.  
'Feels weird, doesn't it?' he said lowly. 'All I keep thinking about is how this place never really felt like home until I left. I keep thinking how much I _hated_ it here at first.' He shook his head slowly, 'How wet it was in winter, how shitty everybody's apartments were, and that first little studio we had that was freezing cold all the time. Having to choose between buying food or cigarettes and always coming down on the wrong side of that. Having to sleep on Kyo's _floor_ for the first month, because I didn't know that to get an apartment, you practically had to shove your deposit at the landlord before you'd even seen the place.'  
Kaoru huffed a laugh. 'Getting that same bus back to the tower every night—'  
'And the bus always being late!' Toshiya laughed, '_Always_!'  
They smiled at each other a little more naturally, and Kaoru reached out and took hold of the railing at the edge of the canal, sort of swinging his body on it like a kid. He climbed up one rung of it, which put him closer to Toshiya's height; he grinned at him.  
'Maybe the success is going to my head, but I'm never taking another bus again. Not unless it has our name on the side.'  
'Me neither. We can taxi around like millionaires,' Toshiya agreed. He hesitated. 'I'd go back though, you know. To all that. If I could.'  
'Mm.' Kaoru's boyish grin relaxed a little. 'Me too.'  
'Yeah?'  
Kaoru shrugged. 'Any time.'  
Toshiya had to look away. 'Any time,' he echoed.  
  
The silence that settled between them after that seemed to be of a different kind: comfortable, less alienating. They stood quite companionably side by side, looking out at the water, trading little remarks as they came to them. Mostly though, they were quiet. Toshiya wondered if Kaoru was feeling the same way he was: that there was so much to think about, somehow. So much to remember, and pick through. So much in the world that you could never hope to cover it all, touch even a small part of it; that inside every person there would always be a closed door, the things they didn't see, didn't know.  
Sometimes there was just so much of _everything_ that he felt crushed by it. That, he thought, was why he suddenly felt so torn apart.  
'You ever wonder what would have gone differently if we'd stayed here?' he asked idly.  
'We only moved a few months ago.'  
'But it's one of those changes that creates so many _new_ changes. Like there could be a parallel universe where we didn't move, and we'd live lives that are unimaginable to us now. There'd be so many things we couldn't account for; so much we couldn't predict. There's just so much...randomness. That's what used to keep me up at night, when I was a teenager. The fucking _randomness_ of everything; how much of life is just...dumb luck.'  
Kaoru smiled, but Toshiya knew that he knew what he meant.  
'Kyo would say that you make your own destiny.'  
'Do you think that's true?'  
'I don't know. Do you think it was your destiny to be walking here, at this time?' He paused. 'Under Kyo's logic, every moment is a potential turning point.'  
'Every moment,' Toshiya agreed. 'What you do, and what you don't do. What you do or don't say.'  
Kaoru was quiet for a while. 'I can see why he likes it,' he said finally, 'That idea. Under those rules, nothing is ever decided forever. Every day is a new choice. The same question asked over and over.'  
Toshiya glanced at him. He hadn't thought of it that way.  
  
Kaoru worried at his lower lip with his teeth. He seemed to be unsure of where to place his gaze: down at his hands, out at the water, up at the sky. He hesitated. Toshiya waited. It seemed important to stay absolutely quiet.  
'I was thinking,' Kaoru said suddenly, 'Before you showed up, about last time we were here together. Two years ago.'  
An errant breeze grabbed at Toshiya's hair, teasing it out around his face, and he hugged his arms around himself like he was cold.  
'That was...a good week,' the bassist said cautiously.  
Kaoru smiled, mostly at the floor. 'My best week,' he said. He had spoken so quietly that Toshiya could have pretended not to have heard him, if he wanted to. The guitarist raised his head, looking him square-on at last. He had an expression that suggested he might have been seeing him for the first time.  
'I should go,' Kaoru said. 'Get on, I mean. There's lots I want to do, so...'  
It was panic that Toshiya realised he was feeling: actual panic. He wasn't ready for this to be over yet. He wasn't ready for this to be over ever. Blindly, desperately he looked up, searching for answers in the blue of the sky and the shapes of the buildings that rose up around them. Clumsily, he pointed.  
'Remember that, though?' he asked hastily. 'That place?'  
Kaoru was silent for a moment. 'Yeah.'  
Toshiya felt like he was about to fall apart, but he forced his voice to come out light, playful. 'I don't believe you,' he said cheerfully. 'Tell me the story.'  
The look Kaoru gave him was not undeservedly exasperated.  
'That's the place that had the For Sale sign,' he said slowly. 'The place where we took a tour.'  
'Remember that estate agent,' Toshiya prodded, 'Her suit, in that shade of red?'  
'Vividly,' Kaoru said. His tone was stiff, but then he gave an involuntary chuckle.  
It was amazing, the flash that Toshiya got of the man he had been before; how precious it felt. He gripped the railing, momentarily off balance.  
'I had a better time than I'd like to admit,' Kaoru said finally, surprising him, 'Asking her all the official questions, whilst you went fluttering around opening cupboards and checking out the views from all the different windows. She didn't know which one of us to try to impress.' His face relaxed a little. 'We made a pretty good team.'  
'We still do,' Toshiya said gently. He cleared his throat. 'On stage, I mean.'  
'Yeah. On stage. We do.'  
The look he gave Toshiya then was so closed off that he could have cried.  
'You know what I did?' Toshiya said instead, 'In my head, I mean? Whilst we were being shown around?'  
Kaoru snorted. 'No, but I'm not surprised you were doing something in your head; that sounds about right.'  
'I was pretending that we were together,' Toshiya said forcefully, 'I was making believe that we were buying a place together. You told me before we went in that it was the kind of place you would have liked. If you had asked me, I would have done it. I would have lived there with you forever.'  
The cloud cleared and the sun flared upon them, lighting Kaoru up down the whole of his left side, brilliant in the afternoon.  
He was quiet for a long time. Toshiya kept expecting him to look away; look out over the water, or down at the floor, but he didn't. Instead he continued to stare up at the building, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He seemed to be struggling with something; his Adam's apple kept bobbing tightly in his throat, and he seemed to be blinking more than normal.  
It took a few minutes for him to get himself back under control. He sniffed, and dropped his gaze. Not to the floor or out over the water but to Toshiya where he stood, backlit by the sun, and glowing.  
In a voice that was only slightly distorted he said, 'You want to get a drink?'  
Toshiya smiled to hide the strange constricting thing his heart was doing in his chest. 'You know me,' he said, as lightly as he could even though his voice was cracking down the middle. 'I always keep a bottle in my room.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE END.
> 
> No, not really. But just _imagine_ if I was that much of a bitch.   
Since I started rewriting this story, there were two things I was really looking forward to: writing Kosuke again (I find his swagger charming!), and writing this scene. I had Toshiya's little confession about the apartment viewing and in particular the line 'if you'd have asked me I would have done it' in my head for a bizarrely long time. Does anybody else have that when they're writing something? Just a weird, nagging sentence that you know you're gonna have to use at some point, but up until then, it won't leave you alone? Is it just me? CAN it be just me? What IS this. What ARE we. I'm going to have a glass of white wine.


	36. Chapter 36

They went to Kaoru's room, because he had the place to himself. A double bed, rather than two twins. They brought the whiskey Toshiya carried in his overnight bag and spread the contents of the minibar over the bed, dozens of little miniatures nestled against the quilted coverlet. Laughing, Toshiya fell back among them, let their little jewel colours click around his shoulders: it was four o'clock and the room was flooded with sunshine and he felt almost drunk already, as if he was full of light.  
He loved the precise way Kaoru moved, mixing liquor into soda water, his hands deft and sure; loved the sweep of hair that fell over his shoulder and the sharp line of his jaw, his cheekbone, the unusually delicate shape of his lips.  
'I love,' Toshiya whispered, 'the bones of you.'  
He didn't think Kaoru heard him: the other man looked at him but just gave him a slightly confused, searching sort of smile. He handed him his glass, and Toshiya tried his best to drink from it without sitting up. It ran down his chin and beneath the neck of his shirt, making him shiver. He turned his head to look at Kaoru where the other man sat down next to him, nestling his cheek against his own hair.  
'You miss your longer hair?' Kaoru asked curiously, and Toshiya gave a little wriggle of a shrug against the bedspread.  
'Kind of. I miss doing stupid shit with it.'  
Kaoru reached out, touched Toshiya's hair where it was fanned out around him. 'Stupider than cutting it into a mullet, you mean?'  
His tone was teasing but his touch was light, almost reverent. He quickly took his hand away, and focussed on drinking his drink. Reluctantly, Toshiya pulled himself upright and took a sip of his own.  
'Way stupider,' he said decisively. 'Maybe next time I'll shave a swearword into one side, or something. Or wax off my eyebrows, or grow a beard.'  
Kaoru snorted. 'What swearword would you choose?'  
Toshiya thought about that for a long time.  
'Fuck,' he said at last.  
'A classic.'  
'Shit just sounds like a mistake.'  
'Mm. Agreed.'  
'And cunt is too gendered.'  
'Sounds like you've been hanging out with Shinya's friends.'  
Toshiya smiled, setting his drink down precariously on the mattress and easing himself backwards again, 'I _love_ Shinya's friends.'  
'I don't understand how ends up friends with so many women, but never has a girlfriend.'  
Toshiya yawned. 'They're all lesbians.'  
'Really?'  
'Yeah, of course.' He gave Kaoru a look that was hard to decipher, 'All the straight ones, he introduces to you.'  
Because Kaoru didn't know what to say to that, he concentrated on emptying his glass. The ice cubes clicked against his teeth.  
  
The afternoon seemed to pass in a yellow-coloured haze. It was warm and time seemed oddly disconnected, like a dream; they spilled drinks on the bed, laughed at each other as the sun slowly sank behind the surrounding buildings and the sky started to bruise and darken. They'd demolished the minibar and made a good go of Toshiya's personal stash; as the bassist lay back against the covers in the early evening, he felt pleasantly fuzzy, as if all his edges were blurring. Nothing, actually, felt very real.  
'Sometimes I wish we could go back,' he said dreamily, 'To the first time we met. Maybe I'd be less of a dick, this time around.'  
Kaoru smiled with half his mouth. 'Nah. You don't want to go doing that.'  
'No?'  
'Maybe if you hadn't been a dick that first day, I wouldn't have wanted you later. In the band,' he added, like it was a correction.  
'So that's how I stood out?'  
'Something like that.'  
Toshiya snorted, shaking his head slowly against the mattress. 'I can't believe those crazy fights we used to have.'  
'Got the job done, though,' Kaoru said comfortably. He was leaning back against the headboard, his legs splayed in front of him and his drink resting neatly in his lap; when he spoke, he slurred just a little. 'And it was never...'  
'Never?' Toshiya prompted when Kaoru trailed off, and the guitarist gave his head a little shake.  
'Maybe I'm remembering it wrong,' he said, his voice that low tone that made Toshiya want to shiver, 'But it was always...good. Sort of. Fighting with you.' He shook his head again. 'It never wasn't fun.'  
Toshiya snorted. 'Believe it or not, I know what you mean.' He turned his eyes up to the ceiling, studying the shapes in the plaster. 'I miss it, sometimes,' he added, quieter.  
'The arguing?'  
'Yeah.'  
'I guess we both have more even tempers now.'  
Toshiya gave him a cynical sort of look.  
'Kaoru,' he said patiently.  
'What?'  
'It's not because our tempers are more even. That's idiotic.'  
'Then—'  
'It's because we don't spend any time together,' Toshiya said harshly. He pulled himself upright, hugging his arms around his own chest defensively. 'That's what I miss,' the bassist added. 'Not fighting with you, just...spending time with you. Having you around. I...' he laughed a little incredulously, 'I miss _you,_ you idiot. I missed you to death.'  
Kaoru was quiet for a little while.  
'I've missed you, too,' he said. Toshiya turned his gaze towards his own lap.  
'Maybe you don't get to miss me,' he said lightly. 'Maybe you gave up that right when you said we couldn't spend any time together.'  
'Toshiya, I did what was best for the band.'  
'Yeah.'  
'It was just – it was what we had to do.'  
Toshiya looked at him. 'Yeah, but I needed you,' he said softly. He gave a limp shrug. 'Did you understand that?'  
Kaoru was silent for a long time, looking down at his own lap.  
'Yeah,' he said at last. 'I understood.'  
  
To Kaoru it felt like it was the kind of night that had perhaps been set in motion a long time ago, a whole confluence of tiny not-coincidences coming together at this one, fixed point of saturated yellow: a lit up hotel room on a spring evening, darkness collecting in the corners of the windows and accumulating on the streets below, the smell of a summer to come on the breeze. They drank until their entire supply was depleted, and then they phoned room service for more. Toshiya paced; he couldn't seem to sit still. And Kaoru watched him.  
His body had changed in the two years since Kaoru had really allowed himself to look at him. The shape his T-shirt clung to now was as much muscle as bone, and when Toshiya knelt on the bed in front of him he was steady despite how much he'd drunk, his gaze quite level on Kaoru's face.  
'My hands,' Kaoru said quietly, lifting them up, 'They're rough. The guitar playing.'  
Toshiya took them by the wrists, and placed them gently on his body. He smiled falteringly, nervously. His eyes closed when Kaoru touched him, and together they stripped off his T-shirt, letting it fall down the side of the bed.  
'We don't have to do anything,' he muttered, and Kaoru kissed him. He felt the shape of his lips, so familiar after all these years, just like the taste of him; felt the change in his breathing as the younger man's hands made fists in the fabric of Kaoru's own T-shirt, using it to pull him closer. Clumsily, they lay down. Kaoru felt shy of his body, but he let Toshiya take his shirt off; when it was over and he was half-naked he flushed, unable to meet the bassist's gaze.  
Toshiya tugged at him. 'Look at me.'  
But he was so beautiful that looking at him, it was impossible not to kiss him. His lips were so soft that they made Kaoru feel helpless; made him want to press against him, push him down against the sheets.  
On the hotel bed, Toshiya looked up at him and smiled.  
'You look good,' he told him in a whisper, and a little shyly, Kaoru ducked his head against Toshiya's bare chest.  
'You've grown up,' he said, his voice muffled. 'You're not a scrawny little kid any more.'  
Toshiya laughed softly by his ear. 'You've grown up, too.'  
'I don't feel like it.'  
Gently, Toshiya's fingertips trailed over his back. He flattened his hands against his shoulders, took in the shape of him.  
'You look beautiful,' the younger man told him, pushing him back a little so that Kaoru had to look him in the eyes. 'Even more than you did back then.'  
'I was scared,' Kaoru admitted quietly, and Toshiya kissed him gently on the lips.  
'I was, too.'  
'Are you scared now?'  
'A little. You?'  
'Yeah.'  
  
They took the rest of each other's clothes off, Toshiya's fingers softly urging Kaoru's chin up. He was hard already, his cock pushing against Kaoru's belly. Tentatively, the guitarist touched him, and Toshiya gave a breathless sort of laugh.  
'Sorry. It's just – being close to you—'  
Kaoru swallowed. 'You don't need to say sorry. I—'  
A little awkwardly, he brought Toshiya's hand down between his own legs; watched the way his eyes seemed to darken slightly as he felt him.  
'You want this?' Toshiya asked quietly.  
'Yeah.'  
Toshiya smiled at him, his face nestled sweetly against the pillow, and Kaoru smiled back even though his face felt almost frozen. He could see the way Toshiya reacted to various touches; gradually, he became bolder. He moved his fingers over the shape of him, like he could commit him to memory.  
'I don't know what to do,' he confessed; Toshiya's smile turned just slightly wicked.  
'With...?'  
'With you.'  
Toshiya's hand tightened around him, startling a little noise from his throat.  
'It depends what you want, I guess.'  
'I want to fuck you.'  
He couldn't miss it: the way Toshiya's dick twitched at that, a reflex like a kick at the palm of his hand.  
'And you know how men do it?' Toshiya teased, and Kaoru nipped just lightly at his neck.  
'I know.'  
He raised his head, smiling even though his eyes were uncertain; he kissed Toshiya's lips. 'Help me, though,' he asked quietly.  
He didn't understand why that made Toshiya kiss him so deeply; pull their bodies together so desperately.  
'We need something,' Toshiya told him.  
'Like a condom?'  
'Like lube,' Toshiya said matter-of-factly. Kaoru swallowed, but gave a brief nod.  
'Okay. Like – lotion? Would that work?'  
'Yeah. There's some in...'  
'The bathroom. Right.'  
It hurt, almost, to pull away from him; to leave his beautiful body spread out on the bed. Kaoru's heart was tapping nervously in his chest; his pulse was rushing through his ears and there was a steady mutter of _what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing_ in his head—  
But somehow, it seemed to be growing fainter, as if he was wandering out of range. He felt weird: not scared exactly but just somehow sensitive, exposed. As though he was the one who was going to be made so vulnerable. As though he was wearing his heart on the outside of his body.

At the doorway between bathroom and bedroom he paused, just looking at him, and Toshiya gave him a tremulous sort of smile.  
'Will you come here?' he asked quietly.  
'Yeah. Sorry. I was just...' Kaoru laughed a little nervously, 'Looking at you.'  
On the bed, he knelt over him. He could see the place in Toshiya's chest where his heart was beating; the skin there twitched. He watched the ripple in the younger man's throat as he swallowed.  
'Here.'  
He took the lotion bottle from Kaoru's hands and poured some on his own fingers. Gently he reached out for Kaoru's cock, and the guitarist jumped at the sudden cold.  
'Fuck!'  
'Sorry.'  
'No, it...' his throat felt dry. 'It feels good.'  
Toshiya met his eye, and gave a laugh that was really more of an exhale.  
'Shit,' he said lowly, 'You look terrified.'  
'I just...' Kaoru shook his head helplessly, 'What if I hurt you, or something?'  
'You won't.'  
'But what if...' but he trailed off, his eyes huge as they followed Toshiya's hand; the younger man had covered his fingers in the lotion and was now actually putting them _inside_ himself, his leg crooked upward at the knee and his breaths soft, shallow.  
'Fuck,' Kaoru breathed again, and Toshiya gave him a look.  
'What?'  
'You just – you look...' Kaoru shook his head helplessly. Tentatively he reached out, his hand on top of Toshiya's; he held his breath as the bassist's fingers moved around him, getting him slippery.  
'Like this,' he breathed, putting Kaoru's hand where it needed to be. Together, they pushed inside him.  
For a moment, Kaoru couldn't say anything. He didn't seem to have any breath inside him. He felt Toshiya's own fingers withdraw and leave just his own; when he moved them, carefully, the bassist's eyes fell closed.  
'Feels better with more,' he whispered, and Kaoru obeyed, pushing another finger inside him, into the heat of him.  
'You're relaxed,' he breathed, and Toshiya opened his eyes, smiling at him.  
'Yeah, well. I'm with you. So.'  
'It doesn't hurt?'  
'It doesn't hurt.' Gently, he kissed him. 'Relax.'  
Kaoru huffed a laugh. 'Feels like it should be the other way around. Me saying that to you,' he said, crooking his fingers experimentally; Toshiya gave a stifled sort of gasp and he stopped sharp.  
'Painful?' he asked quickly, but Toshiya gave his head a lazy shake.  
'_Good_,' he said.  
It felt, weirdly, spellbinding. Mesmerised, Kaoru moved his fingers in the same way over and over again, watching the tiny reactions that crossed Toshiya's face; he went deeper and won a surprised sort of groan from the younger man; moved more purposefully and was rewarded with Toshiya's cock actually leaking a little against his belly.  
'You're blushing.'  
'So are you.'  
Taking him lightly by the wrist, Toshiya pulled his hand away. He wasn't smiling any more. With a nervous sort of movement he settled himself more comfortably on the bed, both his legs bent at the knee. Shaking just a little, as Kaoru watched, he spread his legs wider.  
'You're...'  
'I'm ready,' Toshiya said steadily.  
Silently, the two of them linked their hands on the bedspread. With Kaoru's other hand he reached out; stroked Toshiya's knee where it bent and all the way down his thigh, to his hip, his ass. Soft: he hadn't known men could be that soft. He bowed his head, moved gently forward, found his place between the younger man's legs. His own thighs seemed to be trembling; he swallowed, trying to steady himself, and felt Toshiya's fingers curl comfortingly around the back of his hand.  
So like him, to soothe like that. To give comfort like that, at what felt like the end of the world.  
He had always been, Kaoru realised, the braver one. Of the two of them.  
  
He kissed his cheek and his lips and his forehead and neck. He felt Toshiya's long arms come up and tangle around him. He was full of the overwhelming feeling that he was going to do this, was actually going to _do_ it, and he hid his face in Toshiya's neck as he pushed gently inside him, not wanting the younger man to see how torn-apart it made him feel.  
He heard Toshiya give a long, low sigh. Around him, he felt hot and tight and almost violently alive.  
'Look at me. Kaoru, look at me. Please.'  
Shaking, he did so. There was still a tear track down one side of his face; gently, Toshiya rubbed his cheek against it.  
'Not too late to back out,' Toshiya joked quietly, and Kaoru shook his head.  
'I didn't mean for this,' he said, 'When I asked you. You know I didn't—'  
'Shh. I know. It's okay.'  
Kaoru closed his eyes. 'You feel so fucking good.'  
'So do you. I can feel your heart beating.'  
'Shit,' Kaoru said softly, his mouth dry. He couldn't believe it; he couldn't see what kept Toshiya from simply splitting in two. He felt soft lips press against his shoulder, and squeezed his eyes tighter shut.  
'You can move, Kaoru. It's not going to hurt.'  
He sounded a little breathless: Kaoru risked looking at him. He was flushed, his chest rising and falling shallowly; he smiled nervously. 'Move,' he said again, 'Please, move. I want—'  
Kaoru did so, and he cried out: a low, soft noise that went straight to Kaoru's dick.  
'Oh, fuck,' he breathed, 'Like that.'  
'I...' Kaoru shook his head, grabbing one of Toshiya's hands and pushing it down on the pillow next to his head; their fingers locked there, the position giving him more leverage. 'Fuck,' he gasped without quite meaning to; he lowered his head, kissed Toshiya's lips clumsily. 'Oh, _fuck_.'  
He was inside him, and he was panting. He felt Toshiya's legs come up around his hips, pulling him deeper; watched his head tip back, revealing the hollow of his beautiful throat. The bassist may have been urging him on but he couldn't ever remember feeling so _in charge_ during sex; so in _control_. It should have been scary, really, since he had no idea what he was doing, but it wasn't. Instead it was – _good; _it was_ so _good, pushing into Toshiya's body and making him groan, making his hands scrabble tightly at Kaoru's shoulders; it was good to feel his body open up for him, to make his back arch for him, to make him cry out for him. He wanted to make him cum. He wanted to make it so that he _had_ to cum, just couldn't help himself; he wanted to go as deep as he could in him and make Toshiya feel him.  
Pressed together like this, his belly rubbed against Toshiya's erection as he moved. He couldn't seem to take his eyes off his face; at the little flickers of pleasure that passed over it as Kaoru moved inside him, shifting his angle, growing more confident, fucking him harder. Toshiya gave a broken little groan, his arms tightening around Kaoru's back almost painfully.  
'Oh fuck,' he was muttering, 'Don't stop. Please don't stop. Kaoru—'  
'I'm not stopping,' he replied lowly, amazed at how level his voice was, 'Until you cum for me.'  
Toshiya's dick jerked excitedly against his stomach, and Kaoru closed his eyes and pressed his face into Toshiya's neck, losing himself in the scent of his skin. 'I want to watch you,' he murmured. 'I want to make you feel so good.'  
'Fuck – _Kaoru_—'  
It wasn't anything like Kaoru had known a first time with somebody to be. Toshiya was focussed, present; he kept his eyes open. Towards the end his cock leaked almost constantly, smearing an indecent trail over Kaoru's skin; when he came he bit down on Kaoru's shoulder hard enough to leave a mark but then grabbed for his hips, forced him deeper and arched his back again, his eyes dark and bright and his breathing ragged, shallow, panting out over his soft words: _cum in me, please, please cum in me. I want to feel it. I want to feel you cum_—  
And then held him as he lost it, cumming hard into Toshiya's body, his eyes shut tight. It was the first thing he was aware of back in reality; those arms, hot skin sticking, wrapped around him. The pulse in Toshiya's neck thudded against him.  
And: 'Wait,' he whispered when Kaoru went to pull out of him. 'Just one more minute. Please.'  
With trembling limbs, Kaoru lowered himself down. They lay for a moment, awkwardly, and when they finally did part it was with a strange sense of loss, of something vanished. Kaoru held tight to Toshiya's body. He curled around him.  
  
Silence. Toshiya's breathing was evening out. Up this close Kaoru could see the tiny freckles on the tops of his shoulders. He started to count them, but found that he couldn't; his mind felt vague, dreamy, just distantly panicked. He squeezed the other man tighter.  
'Was that okay?' he mumbled against his neck. He felt it as Toshiya grabbed at his hands and as he clumsily kissed them, and pulled them to the centre of his chest.  
'Yeah,' he said, his voice gone quiet and hoarse, 'That was...'  
'It's okay.'  
'Are you all right?'  
Kaoru smiled against him even though he felt oddly like crying. 'Yeah.'  
They were quiet for a long time after that. Kaoru clutched Toshiya to him as hard as he could, as though he was going to wriggle away; as if that could keep them from ever coming apart. With a lazy, weak-armed sort of gesture, Toshiya reached for the light switch by the bed, and plunged the room into darkness. One-handed, Kaoru pulled the covers up over them. He touched the side of Toshiya's face, just lightly, and inhaled the smell of the back of his neck.  
'You know,' he said finally, 'That kind of reminded me of the first time I ever had sex.'  
'Yeah?'  
'Yeah. Just that once it was done, I couldn't imagine ever doing anything else. Couldn't imagine ever not wanting to do it.'  
'It changes you,' Toshiya whispered against the pillow.  
'Yeah.'  
In time, Toshiya's breathing turned slow and regular. He stirred in Kaoru's hold, and made his soft little noises, his half words. Kaoru closed his eyes.  
For the first time since the tour had started he fell swiftly, and deeply, asleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey look, it's the chapter of the story that I'm least happy with! I feel like this one didn't really get off the ground; sorry, guys. Maybe I'll write some one-shot follow-ups in this universe when they can actually have some proper bangin' sex (assuming they get together at the end, arf arf arf).
> 
> Hope you're all doing well. The lockdown is lifting in my country! Hopefully I can actually go back to work starting from the 15th (of June), and even more hopefully I can also start going to the pub again soon. If nothing else I need the inflated pub prices to actually make me show some self-restraint. I bought 20 beers for £6 from the shop yesterday! This cannot continue.


	37. Chapter 37

A dream: falling. He always dreamt of falling.   
He was walking along a mountain path, cut right into the side of the rock, a sheer drop below. There was barely room for his feet to be together side by side; every time he wobbled, the wind tried to pull him from the edge. When he looked down, it was hazy: the blue streak of trees and then nothing, everything, oblivion. What  _forever_ looked like. He knew it was going to happen before he even went off balance; knew it, because it  _had_ to happen. Was the only thing that could happen. Funny how your body fell, in a dream. So much more like flying, or drifting. So much more like being a leaf, or a feather. Like being nothing but air.  
  
Toshiya awoke to the sound of rain. Blinking, he pulled himself slowly upright, and then winced at the pain in his lower body.   
'Kaoru?' he said uncertainly. The bed next to him was empty; it felt cold, as if it might have been that way a while.  
'Hi.'   
That couldn't be Kaoru's voice, could it; so low but so small, so broken up like that? Toshiya turned, the covers twisting around his bare waist. He shivered; it was cold, and it wasn't easy to see why: one of the hotel windows was wide open and Kaoru was sitting propped up on the sill, smoking. His eyes were very red, his face pale. He was wrapped tightly in one of the hotel bathrobes, but he still appeared to be shivering.   
'Kaoru, what are you...?' Toshiya broke off. 'It's so cold,' he tried again.   
'Sorry.'  
'Come back to bed,' Toshiya said softly, but he knew that the other man wouldn't. His heart was beating in a too-heavy kind of way that made him feel faintly sick. He yanked the covers up as far as they would go, feeling exposed; he pulled his knees up to his chest protectively and rested his chin atop them, watching Kaoru where he sat.   
'Have you been awake for long?'  
The older man gave a tiny shake of his head. 'Not that long. An hour. Maybe.'   
There was a silence between them that seemed to stretch for days. It felt like a cold wind, lifting the dust from the past; revealing, all over again, the two long years that had come between them.   
Ever since he had started travelling with the band, Toshiya had been unable to stop picturing his life as a highway: a single long, barren expanse of road that he was constantly travelling down, speeding towards the end. No turns, and no detours: just that final destination, his aim all along. No map, and no guide. But no choices, either.  
  
'We've made,' Kaoru said in a voice that shook, 'Such a huge mistake.'   
Toshiya felt something inside him freeze. He wanted to say something, but the words seemed stuck in his throat; he simply shook his head, bit down on his lower lip, hugged his knees tighter to his body.  
'I'm hardly even hungover,' Kaoru carried on in that same strange, stiff voice, 'I wasn't even that drunk. I remember all of it. All of it. Every second.'   
He pitched his cigarette out of the window and tried to light up another, but his hands were shaking too badly; he couldn't get the flame of his lighter to get where it was supposed to be. He fumbled, and his lighter dropped: the lighter he'd had since he was eighteen. With a fixed, dispassionate face, he watched it fall.  
'Kaoru, come away from the window. Please. You're – it's making me nervous.'   
Kaoru looked at him and performed something like a smile, but awful. 'What are we supposed to do now?' he asked softly.  
Stiffly, Toshiya got out of bed. There was another hotel bathrobe hanging up in the closet; he wrapped it quickly around himself. There was cum, he realised, dried on his chest and inside his thighs; he could feel it when he moved. He was aware that he was walking with a slight limp, but he crossed the floor to Kaoru quickly, taking his wrists in his hands – his skin was so cold it didn't feel like skin any more, the texture like chilled rubber – and pulling him to his feet. He shut the window and the clatter of the rain dulled slightly. Even with the window closed he could still hear the hiss of car tyres moving over wet asphalt; the sound of life moving onward, relentlessly, below.  
'You're panicking,' Toshiya told him, as calmly as he could. 'It's okay. I panicked too, the first time. Just – please, look at me. Try to—'   
'The first time,' Kaoru repeated, his voice juddering with cold, 'It's – it's the  _last_ time, it— this can't happen again, Toshiya. Never. I...' he shook his head helplessly, 'This isn't the way things are supposed to be. I don't – this isn't  _my life_ .'   
'Kaoru—'  
'It can't be,' the guitarist said, his voice clear but horribly exhausted sounding. 'It just can't.' And he pulled his arms out of Toshiya's grip.  
  
Toshiya took a shaky step back. His hands felt almost unbearably empty, and he crossed his arms over his chest defensively, trying to hide how his fingers trembled.   
'So what are you going to do?' he asked, his voice soft and agonisingly reasonable. 'Freak out? Pretend it didn't happen? Push me away, like you always do?'  
'I don't always—'  
'Yes, you do,' Toshiya cut across him, 'And it's not for the good of the band, or any of that bullshit, so I don't want to hear it. It's—' he paused. 'It's because you're  _scared_ .'   
'Scared,' Kaoru repeated hollowly. He looked down at the floor. 'Scared. Yeah. I suppose so.'   
'You always have been,' Toshiya said, his eyes flashing; it was amazing, the anger that shot through him. The fearful sort of anger he'd felt as a child when his parents hadn't been there; when he'd been alone. He remembered that in an unpleasant flash: feeling furious with them, feeling so afraid. 'What  _is_ it, Kaoru? What are you so afraid of?' It was so  _infuriating_ , the way Kaoru wasn't looking at him: 'What you did? How much you liked it? Holding me, afterwards; falling asleep next to me; waking up with me?'  
'Don't – just don't  _talk_ about it right now; I can't—'  
'No, that's fine,' Toshiya flared, 'I'll do the coping for the both of us. Again.'   
' _Again?_ ' Kaoru repeated, sharper now.  
'Yes, again! What, you think the first time we... you think the first time I didn't tell you because I didn't  _want_ to; because that's just how I roll? You think it was  _easy_ , keeping that to myself? Being so  _fucking_ in love with you, and being all alone with it?'  
'You could have told me,' Kaoru said lowly, his jaw stiff. 'You could have been a man about it and just fucking  _told_ me.'   
'You weren't ready to know,' Toshiya said clearly, gripping the fabric of his robe to try and keep under control, 'I saw your face, the next day. At my apartment, and then at that rest stop. You were fucking  _terrified_ .'   
'So you  _lied_ to me,' Kaoru said hotly.   
'Yeah, I lied to you! To stop you from freaking the fuck out, the way you're doing now!'  
'But you didn't have the  _right_ !' Kaoru exploded, his arms held jaggedly away from his body, 'That wasn't just  _your_ experience, to do what you wanted with; it was  _ours_ ! I – you know I thought I was crazy? I thought I was going fucking  _insane_ , remembering what I remembered; dreaming what I dreamt about—'  
'Poor, poor you,' Toshiya spat. 'Do you have  _any_ idea what it was like for me? You don't think I spent hours just  _agonising_ over what it meant that you were too drunk to remember; if that meant that I did something awful like – like push you into it, or take advantage of you, or— _fuck_ !'  
  
He was crying. He only realised it when his breath came out staggered and jagged mid-sentence; he scrubbed at his face angrily. He knew that Kaoru was crying too, the tears coursing smoothly and silently down his cheeks, but he couldn't seem to find a way to make that make sense in his mind. When the guitarist tentatively reached for him, he found himself shoving him away. He did it so hard that Kaoru stumbled; he kept his lips pressed firmly closed, listening to the way his breaths gasped inside of him.   
'You're a fucking coward,' he heard himself say, and gripped himself tighter. 'I lied to you, and I – I shouldn't have done that. But you...you  _abandoned_ me. And you're about to do it again.'   
'I wasn't ready!' Kaoru cried, his voice breaking thinly. 'How could I have been? You were just – everywhere, suddenly.  _Everywhere_ . Everywhere I looked and in all my thoughts and I just...' he dropped his head, gripping it in his hands, 'I kept thinking about what my father said, about this kind of career and what it was going to do to me, and about Kyo and about the band and the press and I just...'  
'You were my family,' Toshiya said fiercely.   
That shut Kaoru up. He waited, breathing shallowly. In front of him Toshiya was such a sad, angry creature, so wraithlike in the baggy robe, shaking his beautiful head and trying to get the words out, 'Do you understand that? And then I was all alone and you were gone. You were  _gone_ .'   
'I wasn't  _gone_ —'  
' _You were gone! _ Everything that I loved or that I needed from you, you took it away! You left me alone!'  
'I – it wasn't – if you resent me so much, what the hell are you even  _doing_ here? Why would you even  _want_ anything from me?' Kaoru half-shouted, lashing out clumsily.  
'I don't know!' Toshiya fired back; he was so angry, he could barely see. When he swept an arm, his sleeve caught the edge of the night table and knocked it to the floor; something shattered, but neither of them bothered to look. 'I thought – I thought you knew what you were doing. I thought you were  _ready_ .' He took a shaky step backwards and a bright white pain flared through his foot, but he barely felt it, 'I thought that when you were  _holding_ me like that, and  _kissing_ me like that, and  _fucking_ me like that—'  
' _Stop_ it!'  
'I thought it meant something,' Toshiya finished acidly. 'But I never learn, do I?'   
'Stop it,' Kaoru repeated, his voice shaking. Wearily, Toshiya dropped down onto the mattress, clutching at it with both hands.   
'You know,' he said, his voice quieter and softer now, 'I thought I could forgive you. But I – I don't know.' He shrugged, sniffed, wiped his face. 'I really needed you, Kaoru. So much. You were – you were  _everything_ . For a while.' He tried to straighten his back; pushed some hair out of his face. 'But I don't think I can forgive you, and I don't think you can forgive me, either.' He met Kaoru's eye and gave another sad shrug, his shoulders moving awkwardly, out of sync. 'I mean – you hate me, Kaoru. A bit.'   
  
An ugly silence stretched between them. With Toshiya on the bed and Kaoru against the wall they were starkly separate, a narrow band of grey daylight coming between them like a blade. Toshiya heard the click of Kaoru's throat as he swallowed dryly; watched as he used the sleeve of his bathrobe to wipe his face. His eyes were bloodshot and sore-looking; his face stiff with salt. He had bitten every single one of his fingernails.   
Woodenly Kaoru said, 'I don't hate you.' He tried to smile but failed; gave his head a rigid shake. 'I don't want you believing that,' he went on quietly, his voice dry and dead-sounding. 'I could never hate you.'  
'You've hated me,' Toshiya said tiredly. 'When we first met; when I told you what happened with Yoshiki; when I showed up at your apartment. You've hated me.'  
'No.' Kaoru's voice was strangled; he shook his head, body trembling all over. 'No, never hated. I promise. I couldn't.' He sniffed, went for a laugh that turned out like a sob. 'I wouldn't know how. Not you.'  
Quiet. Kaoru dried his face off again and pressed his lips together, pale and numb-looking; Toshiya stared down at his lap. He knew he should move but he couldn't seem to summon up the energy to do so. Standing up alone seemed an insurmountable task; the idea of getting to his feet, walking to his own hotel room and then starting his day seemed like an impossibility. He couldn't even imagine getting on stage: the idea seemed so distant as to be actually bizarre, cryptic, like an ancient ceremony he had to re-enact without ever knowing its true purpose.   
'I had better go,' Toshiya made himself say finally, dully. With a single burst of will he got to his feet and took a single step, but then stopped, dizzy.  
'Toshiya, wait.'  
Kaoru's voice seemed to be coming from very far away.   
'You're bleeding.'   
Toshiya looked down. There was a little crescent moon of blood on the carpet.   
'Oh,' he said faintly. 'Yeah.'   
Kaoru hesitated. His indecision was painful; Toshiya couldn't look at it.   
'Sit down,' the guitarist said at last. 'I'll take a look.'   
  
Mechanically, Toshiya did so: he didn't have enough in him to disobey, any more, even though he thought if he had to spend another ten minutes in this room he might go crazy. He sat listlessly as Kaoru went into the bathroom; he heard the tap run and then watched the older man as he knelt before him, picking his left foot up in both of his shaking hands. He kept his face hidden. His hands on Toshiya's foot were gentle but blunt, stiff. He used a damp hand towel against the cut, applying pressure that felt good and solid even if it was clumsy.  
'It's the lamp,' Kaoru said at last, his voice not quite his own. 'The base broke, when you knocked it. You must have stepped on a shard.'  
'Right.'   
'Toshiya...' Kaoru's hand tightened momentarily around his heel, 'Please. Look at me.'   
'I'm looking at you.'   
'It...' the guitarist shook his head, 'It doesn't need to be like this, I swear. It can...things can be normal, I promise. We can do it.'  
'What? Like the way they were before?'   
'Exactly,' Kaoru said desperately, and Toshiya lowered his head.   
'Never being alone in the same room as you, and never speaking to you, or touching you?' He breathed a sad little laugh, 'I don't want that, Kaoru.'  
On the floor, Kaoru's shoulders sagged.   
'I don't see what choice we have,' he said quietly.   
Toshiya snorted miserably. 'So you think I can go out there and be normal?'  
'I know you can,' Kaoru said. He shrugged unevenly. 'I think you have to. We both have to.'   
'Or?'  
'Or...' Kaoru swallowed thickly, 'Or everything will change, I guess. The band. Everything.' He refolded the towel so an unsullied part of it was against Toshiya's cut and tried to smile up at him, but it failed; it was too weak around the edges, hollow-looking, like a mask. 'I wish I didn't feel this way about you.'   
Toshiya closed his eyes. His hands were white-knuckled where he gripped the edge of the bed.   
'And you were right, too,' Kaoru's voice carried on quietly, 'I am a coward. I've always been a coward.' He gave an awful, broken little huff of a laugh: 'I used to think...it would all sort of work out, one day, without me doing anything. I would just get over you, like that. See I'd been confused all along.' He shook his head. 'It was stupid. Lazy. And – cruel. Everything I never wanted to be. Everything I always hated about other people. But I'm just as bad, I – I'm  _worse_ . I'm so much worse.' He smiled miserably. 'I've never deserved any part of you. Do you see that?'   
  
Toshiya pulled his foot carefully away and gave it an experimental flex, back and forth. It stung, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. His teeth were chattering, he realised; he could hear them inside his head.   
'I should go,' he said. He got to his feet and, stiffly, Kaoru rose with him. On impulse, Toshiya reached for his hand; grabbed it and pulled it to his lips, kissed the back of it dryly, awkwardly. His lips felt cold. Then, he let it drop.   
There was so much he wanted to say. He felt like screaming, but some iron band was tightening around his throat and chest, stopping the sounds from getting out. Unsteadily he padded around the bed, collecting his pieces of clothing from the floor; Kaoru stooped to help him, piling his folded T-shirt gently into his arms.   
'I should put these on.'  
'Yeah.'   
'If Shinya's awake...'   
'Right. Of course.'   
Woodenly he turned his back as Toshiya changed. It took him a while; his fingers didn't seem to be working so well with zips or buttons. When he was done he lay the dressing gown he'd used neatly down at the foot of the bed, smoothing it out more than was necessary. He straightened up. He touched Kaoru's arm to let him know it was safe to turn back around; for a long moment, the two of them simply looked at each other.   
Finally Toshiya said, 'You really were my family, you know. Best I ever did. Closest I ever got. Or something.'  
Red-eyed, Kaoru did a jagged sort of shrug.  
'I always will be,' he said, but he knew it wasn't true.  
'Bye,' Toshiya said. His voice was so faint that it wasn't really a voice at all.   
'Bye.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM SORRY THAT KAORU IS A HORRID BASTARD xx


	38. Chapter 38

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone. I'm so sorry I missed my regular updating day! This should have gone up yesterday, but honestly, my husband and I just got kind of caught up watching this whole situation unfold in the US, and taking a deep dive into documentaries about civil rights and American police. This isn't at all an appropriate platform to say anything about what's going on over there, so I'll try and content myself just to say: my American readers, I am thinking of you and your safety. And fuck your shitty, scary police.

' _OoOOOooh_ .'  
As Toshiya walked stiffly out into the parking lot, Die let out a long, low wolf-whistle, throwing an arm around his shoulders. 'Look what the cat dragged in.'  
'What?' Toshiya asked numbly. Die's arm around his neck felt like a dead weight.   
'We-elllll,' the guitarist drawled, weighing out his words like they were something to be savoured, 'I was at breakfast with Shinya, and a little drummer birdie told me that  _somebody_ didn't come home last night.'   
Helplessly, Toshiya raised his eyes. He found Shinya standing in front of him, smiling ruefully; he gave a little shrug, his cheeks pink.   
'Sorry, Toshiya,' he said good-naturedly.   
'Find some other little, um, perch in the city, did you? Old flame?'  
He kept looking around, as if there was anybody who could help him. His eyes skipped over Shinya's apologetic form, a band of roadies and techs gathered smoking near the front of their bus, Kyo's violently averted gaze. He found Kaoru still red-eyed, white-faced, leaning up against the side of the bus. He was smoking with a hand that shook violently; he met Toshiya's eyes for a moment, and then dropped his gaze.  
Toshiya forced himself to smile, pushing Die's arm off of his shoulders.   
'I'm a gentleman,' he said lightly. 'I don't kiss and tell.'   
'You're no fun.'   
'That's what I hear.' He jerked his head toward the bus jaggedly, 'Are we going, then?'  
'Wow.' For the first time Die had actually peered into his face, 'Toshiya, are you  _okay?_ '  
'Yep. Perfect. Should we get on the bus?'  
'You look  _rough_ . Almost as bad as dear leader, over there.' Die indicated with a thumb and Toshiya swallowed hard against the wave of nausea that rose in his throat. 'Apparently Kaoru had a heavy night. Can't even stand up straight.'   
'Right,' Toshiya said.  
'Seriously, what's up with you? You look terrible.'   
'Is that supposed to make me feel better?' Toshiya snapped, running his hands shakily through his hair. 'Sorry. I'm fine. I just...' he shook his head, 'It's nothing. I'm fine. A hangover.'   
To his credit, Die looked supremely unconvinced, but he nodded uncertainly. 'You gonna be all right for the show?'  
'Sure.'  
'Are you limping?'  
'I tripped,' Toshiya said smoothly, though he felt rattled. When he smiled at Die, it felt as though he had to physically push the expression onto his face. 'Come on, let's go. I want to get set up.'   
'Yeah,' Die said, though he still sounded uncertain. 'Yeah, okay.'   
Stiltedly Toshiya nodded and started walking towards the bus, his head down. The door was closed, and he hovered a good metre or so back from Kaoru as the older man tugged at it, cursing in a voice that sounded like it was about to shatter. When he gave up, he thumped his fist so angrily against the side of the bus that even Kyo jumped.   
'Here,' Toshiya said softly. Moving past him, he felt for the little latch beneath the handle and pushed it inward; with a sound like a wheeze, the door opened.  
Kaoru looked at him painfully. 'Thanks,' he murmured.   
'Yeah. Don't mention it.'   
Kaoru gave a sad little spasm of a shrug. 'After you,' he said.  
'No, it's okay.'  
'No, really. Just – you go. It's fine.'   
'Excuse me.' Delicately, Shinya stepped between them. He gave Toshiya a sweet sort of smile. 'Come on, Toshiya,' he said in his smooth, neutral voice. 'You should sit down. There's cold water on the bus. That'll help.'   
Kaoru stepped back and let them pass. He barely felt it as Die clapped him on the shoulder; he stood there, very still, as the rest of his band piled onto the bus, and finally, with legs that felt like stone, he dragged his body up the step to join them.   
  
Their show that night in Osaka was fine. Not great, not terrible. From his position at the left side of the stage Kaoru could see everyone, and every so often he swept his eyes over them, taking his cues from their movements. Everybody looked very bright and distinct but distant, like he was looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. They sounded the same way, too; faraway, an underwater sound. He watched Kyo's mouth move and realised he couldn't decipher a single word. Toshiya was both standing and playing stiffly, his posture sort of broken and sagging around his instrument, but nobody seemed to be noticing; the crowd was doing all the right things, making all the right faces and noises. It was fine. It was all, actually, okay.   
But afterwards, off stage, he felt as though he was about to throw up; he felt so ill that he actually felt a pinch of alarm, like he might have something really wrong with him. He was silent on the bus on the way back to the hotel, his lips clamped tightly together so that he wouldn't give into the huge, ballooning urge to vomit that was growing inside him. When they at last arrived and Die and Shinya were loitering about in the lobby talking about getting drinks and Toshiya was standing still with that same numb expression he'd had on all day, Kaoru rode up in the elevator alone. He unlocked his door and saw the bed they'd lain in. The housekeeper had made it up and replaced the lamp on the bedside table. The little crescent of Toshiya's blood had been sponged from the carpet.   
With wide, lunging steps he lurched into the bathroom and threw up violently into the toilet. He was groping for the flush when he convulsed again; shaking, he dropped to his knees. Cold sweat glued his T-shirt to the small of his back; weakly, he pulled it off. He flushed the toilet and started the shower, brushing his teeth whilst he waited for the water to warm.   
He couldn't face the thought of pulling back the covers on that bed, lying on that mattress, trying to fill that two-person space with his single body.   
He had slept so soundly, by Toshiya. He had been aware, a few times through the night, of the younger man's fidgeting; the soft mumbling noises he made, the sharp knob of an elbow sliding past his ribs. Each time it had felt more like a dream than anything else: that warm body, those sweet noises. He had fallen back to sleep almost instantly, the bassist held tight in his arms.   
Yet they hadn't woken up that way. At some point in the night, one or the other of them had wriggled away from the other. That was what had woken Kaoru up properly: the sudden coldness. The loss.   
It was finally safe to cry, and so he did. He slid down the bathroom wall and huddled himself into a tight little knot. He was mostly silent but for one single, soft sobbing noise that echoed around him in the emptiness of the bathroom. He was entirely alone.   
  
After Osaka, the spirit seemed to have gone out of them a bit. The rest of the dates started blurring together, Osaka to Kobe to Hiroshima; no difference between any one of them. Kaoru had developed a way of tuning out for great, long periods of time, so that he would wake as if from a trance to find himself climbing off the bus or getting out of the shower or halfway through eating a meal, chewing and swallowing as part of some mechanical process because everything he ate seemed to taste like cardboard and stuck in his throat. He didn't weigh himself, but over the course of a few days he noticed that his cheeks looked gaunter, his skin slacker. His face didn't seem to be losing its pale look. At night he couldn't sleep, but that hardly mattered: he would simply sit on the bed – or lie down, if he was sharing the room with somebody else, for appearance's sake – and space out. He pictured himself like a blank tape: play thirty minutes of pure silence. Turn it over, and play thirty minutes more. The events that stuck in his mind were the ones that featured Toshiya: the other man's wan, lost-looking face floating next to him on the stage. He wasn't drinking, Die told him, but he didn't seem to be doing a whole lot of anything else, either. He was sleeping a lot. In Kobe the five of them were standing backstage, stage makeup applied and hair styled, and Toshiya had simply crumpled over. It was so swift and so sudden that Kaoru's first, absurd thought was that he'd been shot: he stepped forward but faltered and it was Die who swooped in, took the bassist under his arm and, with a wide-eyed look around at everybody else, shepherded him out into the corridor. He caught a quick, snapshot sort of glimpse of Toshiya's face: enough to know that he was crying. The image stuck around in the front of his mind; he wore it on the insides of his eyelids when he blinked. He heard Die talking to Toshiya in low, helpless tones for a long while. With a pinched facial expression, Shinya had flicked the radio on.   
  
By April 17 th they were in Fukuoka, and the blossom was out again, and the wind brought them the faint sounds of seabirds keening as they wheeled around the sky. Kaoru had experienced one of those bizarre moments where he had looked at the clock and been unable to decipher whether it was half past seven in the morning or at night. But no, it would be lighter if it was morning. That meant he still had the whole aching, endless night to get through.   
He was rooming with Kyo, who was tucked up into a tight little parcel on his own bed, his ears covered by headphones and his eyes tightly shut; clearly not asleep – his lips were moving faintly – but definitely checked out. He didn't respond when Kaoru collected his cigarettes and lighter from the bedside table and got to his feet. When he left the room, Kyo's eyes were still shut fast.   
Some odd sickness had afflicted his limbs lately: no matter what he did, they seemed to grow heavier and heavier. It was as if he was trying to walk through thick mud. By the time he got outside onto the veranda, he felt exhausted enough to drop.  
'Hello, Kaoru.'   
By the wooden veranda railing, the slight form of a person had turned towards him.  
'Shinya,' he said listlessly. He couldn't seem to figure out which muscles were required for smiling. 'What are you doing out here?'   
The younger man shrugged. 'Enjoying some fresh air. I like the sound that seagulls make. They sound so sad. And it reminds me of home.'   
'I don't know why there don't seem to be any, in Tokyo.'   
'Kaoru,' Shinya said, his voice so definite that he sounded like somebody else, 'You need to talk to me. You need to tell me what's going on.'   
Limply, Kaoru shrugged. He leant up against the side of the building heavily. 'Usual tour stuff. You know. Can't sleep.'   
'I know it's something to do with Toshiya,' Shinya said matter-of-factly. 'I'm not an idiot.'  
'It's not—'  
'You're walking around like zombies,' Shinya interrupted (and when was the last time Shinya had actually  _interrupted_ somebody?), 'Both of you. You've lost weight and Toshiya looks half-dead and I'm – scared. I'm scared of this.' He frowned at the horizon. 'I hate it,' he said, surprisingly vehement. 'So you talk to me, right now.'   
He paused for just a moment. 'Please,' he added.   
  
And oddly enough, it was just that – just that  _please_ , tacked so hastily on the end, such a nod to a politeness that had no place in this complete fucking mess of a situation – that broke Kaoru. It didn't even hurt that much: there was just the feeling of his spine suddenly sagging, and the wooden floor of the veranda rushing up to meet him, and the dim humiliation of knowing that he was sobbing his fucking guts out in front of Shinya Terachi, of all people. Properly crying, the way he hadn't done in front of another person since he was a child: gulping, gasping, choking on his own jagged sobs. He had never appreciated how much like vomiting crying was. Gently, as if from a great distance, Shinya patted his shoulder. He covered his face with his hands.  
'Kaoru,' he said. 'It's okay.'   
'I fucked up,' he heard himself saying, muffled, 'I fucked up so badly, Shinya.'   
'What happened?'  
He shook his head fitfully. 'I – I can't tell you.'   
'Kaoru,' Shinya said sensibly. He waited until the guitarist dropped his hands; until Kaoru was looking up at him, wet-faced, with a pair of frightened rabbit eyes. Audibly, he swallowed.  
'We slept together,' he said in a whisper.   
There was a short moment whilst Shinya adjusted himself properly to that.   
'Oh,' he managed finally. There was a long pause before the drummer asked, 'When?'   
'Osaka.'  
'He was with you all night.'   
Kaoru couldn't look him in the eye. 'Yeah.'   
'Wow.'  
'So you...have feelings for him, then.'  
At that, Kaoru gave a sad little snort. 'You could say that.'   
'You love him.'  
'I am so, so fucking in love with him.'   
Shinya didn't say anything for a long moment, and Kaoru closed his eyes again. 'But you don't need to worry about anything,' he continued heavily. 'We're not together, and it's not going to get in the way. The band...'   
'Why not?'   
'Hm?'  
'Why aren't you together?' Shinya asked curiously. At the look Kaoru gave him, he just shrugged. 'It doesn't seem like you're happy this way.'  
'Shinya, we can't...you know we can't do that. Do you have any idea how hard it would be to hide? What would happen if we were found out? I can't even imagine how Kyo would react, and – you know Toshiya's more –  _feminine_ looking than me; what would people assume about him, if it got out? He'd be crucified.'  
'Hm.' Neatly, Shinya squatted next to him. He kept his spine so beautifully straight, like he'd been drawn with a ruler. 'I don't see why it would be harder to hide than anything else.' He gave a little shrug. 'Nobody's found out about him being gay so far, and you know how it needs to be handled. I can't think of anybody safer for him to be with than you.'   
'But Kyo—'  
'You're really going to let Kyo stand in the way?' Shinya asked mildly.   
'What if he left the band over it? We'd be ruined.'  
'Yes, we would. But I don't see that happening.'  
'No?'  
'No.' Shinya sighed softly. 'I don't think he'd fancy it, really.' He looked out at the horizon: from their vantage point they could just about see the sea, a great black shadow in the distance. He got to his feet and walked towards the railing at the edge of the veranda, indicating with his head for Kaoru to follow him. Together, they leant against it. The wood was so old it felt powdery.   
'You act like Kyo doesn't love us,' Shinya said conversationally, 'But he does. He certainly wouldn't be here if he didn't.' He paused. 'You're not stupid, so I think you know that. So what's the real reason?'  
'The real...?'  
'Why aren't you and Toshiya together?'   
  
Kaoru didn't answer for a moment. There was a coastal breeze pushing his hair back; he closed his eyes gently against it and allowed it to wash over him. It smelled like the sea. Like salt. He kept waiting for Shinya to prompt him, but the younger man seemed happy to wait. He stood very patiently, not tapping his fingers or swinging his body; the only thing that moved was his hair, the wind making it flutter around his face.   
'I'm not good enough for him,' Kaoru said at last, quietly. 'I've been such a coward. I'm not...' he looked down at his own hands on the railing, swallowing painfully, 'I'm not brave enough for him, not tall enough, not good-looking enough. Not anything enough, really. I...let him down, and I hurt him. Made him feel alone.' He smiled sadly, closing his eyes again. 'Everything I didn't want to do.'   
Shinya was quiet for a minute, absorbing that. What Kaoru was grateful for was that he didn't try to argue; he didn't think he could have stood it otherwise.  
'I think Toshiya is supposed to make those sorts of choices,' Shinya said finally. 'About who's good enough for him. Not you.'   
Slowly, Kaoru shook his head. 'He'd realise one day,' he said, directing his words out to the sea. 'He'd realise, and he'd leave me. There are things I've done that I just...' he took a deep breath, 'I just don't know how to fix.'   
'Maybe they can't be fixed,' Shinya said, and Kaoru gave a miserable exhale of a laugh.  
'Great.'  
'I don't think everything has to be fixed all the time, though.' Shinya tilted his head to the side gently, thinking. 'It's like putting an ending on something,' he continued, 'When it's not finished yet. Not  _time_ for the end. Things are only ever really fixed when everything is over; when it's all done. I don't think you're done, yet.' He paused. 'Toshiya is in love with you. But I don't really know too much about it.'   
Kaoru had to smile at that. 'No?'   
'No. What love is or isn't has always been a mystery to me, honestly. Perhaps I'm sort of glad. It looks like torture.'  
Kaoru frowned. 'I don't understand.'  
Cryptically, Shinya just shrugged, and Kaoru looked at him. 'Are you saying you've never  _been_ ...?'   
'No,' Shinya said neutrally. 'I don't think I can, really. It's just not something my body does. I see it going on all around me, between my friends and my parents and in films, and I can't help but think, really? Something is worth all of this fuss?'  
'Fuss?'  
Shinya raised an eyebrow. 'From what I've seen,' he said matter-of-factly, 'Love is a disaster. It makes you miserable. It makes you doubt yourself, and hate yourself, and rip yourself apart. Makes you crazy. Makes you –  _weird_ .' He shrugged. 'It just seems like sort of a bother. Honestly.'   
Kaoru had to laugh at that, snorting sadly, eyes closed.   
'You're completely right,' he said.  
'Yeah. I suspected as much.'  
'But I just...' Kaoru shook his head, 'I don't know what to do with it. All the love I have for him; I'm just carrying it around with me, and I don't know where to put it.'   
Shinya tucked some hair neatly behind his ear. 'Same thing you would do with anything you don't want, I suppose. Get rid of it, or give it away.'   
He sighed softly, and stepped back from the railing. 'I think I'm going to go in. It's getting cold.'   
'Right. Good night, Shinya.' Kaoru found it hard to look at him. 'Thanks.'   
'Mm. Good night, Kaoru.'   
  
Alone, Kaoru sat out on the veranda for a long time. He felt too sick to smoke, but it was oddly soothing to be in the fresh air, watching the shadow of the sea darken and then slowly start to take on moonlight. It was cold, but he didn't mind it so much. His whole body felt somehow lighter, as though some great boulder had been heaved off his chest. Until it was gone, he hadn't realised how much it had been weighing him down. 


	39. Chapter 39

The night of their show in Fukuoka marked something of a milestone: it was the first night that they were to spend the night on their new tour bus instead of in a hotel – their next live was up in Sendai, a drive of almost twenty hours. They played the show and then were given an hour or so to clean up as best they could at the venue; the five of them stumbled around each other in the two small, echoey bathrooms backstage, scrubbing off stage makeup and washing as best they could at the two chipped sinks. With an inelegant frankness, Die simply stuck his whole head under the tap and then drew up, shivering, shaking himself like a dog. They changed into regular clothes and formed a huddled, straggled sort of group outside in the now almost completely empty parking lot to the venue, Kaoru and Die smoking and Kyo drinking a cup of hot water. They were quiet; Kyo never had much to say after a show, and Die's adrenaline had worn off and Kaoru simply felt exhausted. They waited for Shinya and Toshiya – the most finicky ones about washing up, wouldn't you know – and traipsed onto the bus shortly before midnight.   
In a way it reminded Kaoru of the end of their tour two years ago: driving back to Osaka from Niigata through the long, dark night, putting the highway miles behind them. Weird to think how simple things had been then; how little he had known about what would come to pass. The setting had changed – the tour bus appreciably more comfortable than their old, cramped minivan – but the characters had remained the same. The lights of Fukuoka city died out behind them, gradually being lost over the headland. To one side was the sea, invisible in the darkness.   
'C'mon.'   
Kaoru swam out of his fog to find Die next to him, looking oddly grown-up; the younger man smiled at him almost ruefully, and nodded towards his seat. 'You want to recline that? Got a hell of a long drive ahead.'   
'Yeah. I'm okay, actually. I don't really feel that sleepy.'   
'Suit yourself.' Die shrugged and made to turn away, but then hesitated. The bus shuddered as it went over a slightly uneven road surface, and he steadied himself on the headrest of the empty seat beside his fellow guitarist. 'You know, Shinya's planning to have us stop at Lake Biwa again.'   
'It's going to become a ritual.'   
'I think so.'  
'The southern shore, this time. Unless we're making a detour.'   
'Southern shore,' Die agreed. 'Might be kind of nice to see it from that angle. Get a bit of a different perspective.'   
Kaoru suddenly looked very shrewdly at Die's face, but the other man just shrugged in an innocent sort of way. 'Get some sleep,' he said, and made his loping way back up the aisle, clutching the seat backs for support. He took the chair in front of Shinya, who was already reclined and dozing, serene as an animal.   
  
Looking ahead up the length of the bus, Kaoru could see all of his bandmates reflected in the dark windows: Kyo, his eyes closed and his seat upright, his body curled right over and his head nodding against the armrest; Shinya, only the very edge of his profile visible from his reclined position; Die, fussing with his chair. They were all on the left side of the bus; only Toshiya was on Kaoru's side of the aisle, and just a few seats ahead. He wasn't lying down, but he was clearly asleep; his face was turned towards the window and every so often Kaoru would catch the ghostly reflections of his lips as they moved, forming some furrily incomprehensible question or complaint as he dreamed.   
He felt such a strong wave of pure love that it turned him almost breathless. He found himself gripping both armrests tightly.   
Toshiya's hair was damp from where he'd wet it to get the gel and spray out; it was hanging around his face, fluffing slightly as it dried. His eyes were closed but, even in such a poor reflection, deeply shadowed; his face against the dark landscape rushing past them was whiter than white; so white it was almost green.   
He realised too late that Die was giving him a highly significant look. He turned his own gaze hurriedly down to his lap.   
  
As they put the miles behind them, a strange, soporific kind of quiet took hold of the whole bus. Not everybody was asleep, but they were all somehow sealed off from each other, like they were caught within their own little worlds. It made Kaoru think of an aeroplane: of night time on an aeroplane, and that strange hush that took over when the lights went off. There would be the soft sounds of clipping and unclipping seatbelts, people resettling themselves, and if you walked the aisle you would see people asleep and people awake and people reading in little circles of private light, people watching TV, everybody so distinct and yet the same, and untouchable, like statues.   
He was awake to watch the sun start to come up. Around five it started to get light; it was dawning clear, the sky a reddish sort of colour at the eastern horizon. He blinked sleepily and tried to move his limbs around a little; after playing a show and then sitting still for so long, they had all but seized up. Painfully, he extracted himself from his seat and walked a little stiffly to the back of the bus, trying to get his legs to wake up. He turned and started going back the other way, trying his best to balance without holding onto anything.   
He passed Shinya, sound asleep; Die, snoring. Kyo was absorbed in a book but when Kaoru passed he gave him a single, deep nod, and Kaoru gave him half a smile and nodded back.   
Then there was Toshiya.   
The blanket he'd covered himself with had slipped off, and inwardly, Kaoru felt like rolling his eyes: this kind of cheesy romantic setup was supposed to only happen in movies, wasn't it? Toshiya was shuffling around in his sleep, clearly missing it; his hair was sticking up at the back from the way he'd been tossing and turning even within the narrow confines of his seat. Kaoru checked briefly over his shoulder and found Kyo giving him a very solid, level stare from over the top of his book.  
Kaoru opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it again. He shook out his arms a little lamely and then stooped to retrieve the blanket. As carefully as he could, he tucked it back in around Toshiya's shoulders. He stepped back, and shoved his hands in his pockets, and turned to look at the vocalist.   
It took a moment, but Kyo simply shrugged – just a tiny ripple of his shoulders, almost ignorable – and then went back to his book.   
  
It was just a little past seven when they arrived at the lake. The bus pulled over to the side of the road with a wheeze, and the lights went on, and all up and down the aisle people were suddenly stirring, casting off blankets and unbuckling seatbelts, stretching their arms up into the air so that, for a brief moment, the inside of the bus looked like some sort of enclosed roller coaster. Because Kaoru hadn't slept, all the sounds seemed hyper real: he heard people shifting their feet, stamping the pins and needles out of them; he heard the driver turn in his seat and call down the length of the bus: 'Lake Biwa. Ten minutes.'   
And then leave, dropping down the steps to go and have a smoke in the early morning air.   
Outside, it felt very cold and fresh: the sun was a bright golden glare on the horizon but it hadn't had much of a chance to warm up the air yet. Kaoru felt all right – he was aware that he was cold, but because he wasn't sleeping he felt cold most of the time anyway – but he heard Kyo make some squawking noise of complaint when he came down the steps, and when Toshiya emerged, barefoot and blinking dazedly in the sunshine, it was with the blanket still tangled around his shoulders. He looked pale and confused; he glanced around, as if for assistance.   
Kaoru said, 'Will you come with me?'   
He blinked; he seemed to have trouble focussing. He pulled his blanket tighter around his body.  
'Are you sure?' he said at last, his voice low and a little rough.  
'Yeah. I'd really like to talk to you, if that's okay.'   
It killed him how Toshiya looked around, checking to make sure that nobody was watching them.   
  
There was no narrow strip of beachy sand at this part of the lake; there was simply a man-made barrier of huge boulders, marked in shades of faded green at various points by the tide. It was here that Kaoru and Toshiya walked, picking their careful way across the rocks, the general babble of their bandmates and the sight of their bus falling out of range behind them. Toshiya went first. After a few steps he dropped the blanket, leaving it casually in his wake; the sunlight fell golden on his bare arms, the exposed side of his neck. He moved his body so beautifully, Kaoru thought; the sway of him, the bold reach of legs, the confident way he held his arms outright for balance. He had such a rhythm to him, the way he did on stage, just communicated into something else. His hair blew forward around his face.  
'_Fuck_!'  
It was Toshiya who caught him when he slipped; he fell hard, catching one knee on the rocks whilst his other leg missed them entirely, his foot ending up perilously close to the water.   
'Goddamn it, Kaoru. You almost gave me a heart attack.'   
Toshiya helped him to yank himself upright; they both spared a rueful glance at his knee, where his jeans now bore an untidy rip, before looking back up at each other. 'What the hell happened?'  
His skin was so golden, in the morning sun. His eyes were shot through with light, so dark and clear, the colour of wild honey. On his face was an expression of worried impatience and, below it, just a hint of frustrated amusement.  
'Honestly?' Kaoru mumbled.  
Toshiya looked a little exasperated. 'Yeah, honestly.'   
Kaoru shoved his hands in his pockets, trying to will himself to be brave. 'I was looking at you,' he said in an indistinct rush. Toshiya frowned.   
'What?'  
'I said, I was looking at you. You looked so beautiful,' Kaoru explained painfully, 'The way you were walking, and I just couldn't stop looking at you, and I didn't watch where I was going, so I...slipped.'   
Awkwardly, he shrugged. Because it was growing hard to look at Toshiya, he directed his gaze out over the lake instead. It sparkled like something shattered.   
'While I'm being honest,' he said quietly, 'I thought I might just tell you that – that I can barely stop looking at you, ever. And I'm sorry, and I know I've been a coward, and I know that you maybe can't forgive me for everything. But I want to try to be better, for you. I want to try and be brave.'  
He stopped, suddenly out of breath. He couldn't bring himself to look at the other man's face; he just swallowed, thickly, and kept his eyes trained on the water. It was oddly mesmerising, when you stopped to look at it: the water, on that morning. Stretching for miles and reflecting the light. He thought that it might well have been close to being the second most beautiful thing he had ever seen.   
'You fell over because you were looking at me?' Toshiya said finally, hesitantly, and Kaoru had to turn back to him.  
'That's what you're taking away from this?' he said a little incredulously. Toshiya's face was hard to read: it made him nervous.  
'But – really?'   
'_Yes_,' Kaoru said, bobbing his head in an exasperated movement, 'Really.'   
Toshiya looked away for a moment, shaking his head. His lips moved; he seemed to be struggling to decide what to say. He looked out over the lake as if it would have an answer for him, and then shook his head again.  
'You're such a fucking idiot,' he said at last, and Kaoru gave a painful nod.  
'Yeah. That sounds about right.'   
  
Toshiya sat down, and a little awkward and off-balance, Kaoru sat down beside him. They dangled their legs over the sides, Kaoru's just skimming the surface of the water and Toshiya's bare toes submerged, pale-coloured and distorted beneath the surface.   
'I'm sorry,' Kaoru said again, a little more slowly and calmly, 'For everything. For what happened in Osaka, and for pushing you away. I know it's not an excuse...' he squinted against the sun, 'But I was just – scared. Really, really scared. Not of what we did so much, but just...how I felt about you. How I _feel_ about you. Letting you down, and not being good enough for you. Scared of letting myself love you, _really_ love you, and you – leaving. So I left first.' He tried for a smile. 'And...you told me that I was your family, and I said something fucking stupid when what I should have told you was that you're my family, too. And I do love you. I don't know how to not love you.'   
For a long while, Toshiya was silent. The lake lapped gently beneath their feet. Some water bird landed briefly near them, its shining beak dipping below the water, and then with a fussy flapping of its wings it took off again, flying away out of sight in the direction of the distant shore. The water was full of tiny, darting little fish, their black bodies barely more than shadow. It was very quiet.  
Finally Toshiya looked at him and said, 'Prove it.'   
Kaoru blinked. 'Huh?'  
Toshiya shrugged. 'Prove it. If you love me, and you want to be with me, then prove it.'   
'But...how?'   
The bassist smiled in a strained sort of way. 'Songwriter,' he said quietly. 'You don't have some grand romantic gesture up your sleeve?'   
Kaoru felt temporarily stunned, but one thing was too important to be ignored: Toshiya was looking at him, full in the face, and smiling at him. A sad smile; a tense, painful, hesitant smile, but a smile nonetheless.  
And that was not a small thing.   
With a slightly dry mouth Kaoru said, 'You got a plectrum on you?'  
'Huh?' Toshiya started to scrape about in his jeans pocket, 'Yeah, always.' He unearthed one. 'Here.' He dropped it into Kaoru's palm, and the guitarist held it up at arm's length, against the sun. It was black plastic, scored all over.   
'This is a piece of you, right?' Kaoru said seriously. 'It's – a tiny, almost insignificant part of you, a part of you nobody is supposed to care about. But part of you all the same.'   
Looking amused, Toshiya said, 'I guess.'   
In a single, stiff-armed movement, Kaoru flung it into the water. Then, before he had time to second-guess himself, he lurched to his feet and leapt in after it.   
  
'_Kaoru_!'  
He heard Toshiya's shout of alarm over the weird turbulent sound of the water in his ears; it was so cold that it stunned him, made his limbs stiffen up in alarm. Under the water everything looked murky. He kicked out.   
There was a mild sense of panic: he'd only had a few swimming lessons as a child, and those generally hadn't gone well. He was aware of the basic mechanics – what was supposed to move, and when – but now that he was actually in the lake, those movements seemed awkward and ungainly and not really of much practical use. He flailed his way through the water in a sort of modified doggy paddle, trying to keep his head as high above the surface as possible and fighting off the self-conscious knowledge that he must look like a complete moron. He had his gaze fixed on that little black plectrum, bobbing around on the water, a neat dark shape that broke up the way the sun shone on the waves. It kept surging away from him when he reached out, but finally he managed to close his hand around it, its corners digging uncomfortably into his palm. His head dipped a little lower in the water than he would have liked; he came up, spluttering, treading water as best he could.   
  
All of a sudden the shore seemed very far away: Toshiya was little more than an exclamation point on the edge of the water, all flapping arms and panic that was too distant for Kaoru to hear it. The water was cold; so cold. It made it hard to think or to orient himself: his vision was blurry without glasses or contact lenses and the little tide of the lake seemed to be urging him in a direction he didn't want to go. He thrashed his legs pointlessly beneath the water. He could feel it lapping higher and higher around his neck and chin and cheeks. His clothes felt very, very heavy.  
Kaoru kept his eyes open as he slipped back under. He felt an odd lack of fear. The world beneath the surface was yellow and green and black, foggy with sediment, weeded, flickering with the sunlight and the darting shapes of fish. Silvery bubbles churned, and a small current spun him. An anchor hooked around the back of his T-shirt and dragged him, coughing, into the air.  
'Are you fucking _crazy?_ _You can't swim!'_  
Kaoru blinked, breathless and oddly confused. An arm strong as a rope wrapped itself around his chest.  
'I think I felt a catfish or something go around my legs,' he managed to say. His teeth were chattering so harshly he could barely understand himself. He was moving through the water like a boat, Toshiya his propeller, the bassist's head as wet and slick as an otter's; he swam confidently, graceful even one-handed, and when Kaoru closed his eyes he found he could _see_ it: Toshiya's whole childhood spent leaping into freezing cold mountain lakes, splashing, touching the bottom, turning somersaults and standing on his hands. Toshiya growing taller, and stronger. So adept in this world; so much more adaptable than he ever gave himself credit for. A born survivor, really.  
They reached the rocks at the edge of the lake and Toshiya yanked himself out of the water before tugging Kaoru painfully up after him. Both of them sat there a moment, shivering. Wide-eyed, Toshiya didn't seem capable of much more than staring at him in disbelief.   
As delicately as he could, Kaoru spat out lake water. His clothes dripped darkly over the boulders. When he opened his hand, the plectrum was there on his palm.   
'Here,' he said. Gently, Toshiya reached out and took it.   
  
They helped each other, this time, across the rocks. It was not affectionate so much as necessary: both of them were trembling so hard that they were barely in control of where they put their feet, and Kaoru's mind felt slowed-down and dreamy. When they reached the place where he'd dropped his blanket, Toshiya picked it up and tugged it around both of their shoulders, pulling their bodies in tight.   
And then, beneath its folds, he took Kaoru's hand. He was still holding the plectrum; ignoring Kaoru's quizzical look, he pushed it back against the guitarist's palm.  
'Since it's a part of me, maybe you should look after it,' he said, his voice slightly husky and juddering with cold. 'For now, I mean.'   
'Oh. For now. Yeah.'   
Toshiya linked their fingers together.  
'I'll take good care of it,' Kaoru said.   
  
  



	40. Chapter 40

New Mexico, 2010.  
  
This is how it ends:  
  
Carefully, trying his best to be quiet, Toshiya unlatched the door and stepped out, barefoot, onto the wraparound veranda. Outside was hot and muggy but slightly less oppressive, at least, than it was in the daytime. The air was full of night sounds: cars rushing by along the interstate, the metallic whine of insects, a strange yelping scream that might have belonged to a coyote.   
It was just about three in the morning here, but six in the evening back home. He couldn't ever seem to get the time zone straight with his body; even after two weeks of touring here, he still woke up in the middle of the night feeling starved and found himself unaccountably exhausted at midday.   
He leant against the railing, which was shedding flakes of paint, and lit up a cigarette. The veranda was covered over by a roof that was wired with dim outdoor lights: each one attracted its own swarm of bugs, big enough that he found it more comfortable to not look at them. There were spiders, too, their webs lit up like Christmas decorations, each one studded with a fat body in the middle.   
When he closed his eyes the day he'd had seemed to rush past him: a flat landscape in shades of yellow and brown and beige; a flat sky in royal blue. The smell of sun-baked asphalt, and the hum of the engine, and Kaoru beside him; Kaoru beside him during their smoke break, drawing patterns in the sandy gravel with his foot. Deer bones by the side of the road, bleached completely colourless, and the feeling of being dazed into hypnosis by the relentless beat of the sun, more white than gold. Shinya snoozing on the bus, his book laid slackly open in his lap; Kyo and Die playing with a painted wooden cup and ball toy that Die had picked up somewhere en route for his son, embroiled in a reasonably intense competition with it – the rules had kept changing; they kept talking over each other. Kaoru in the seat next to him. Soundcheck and then their show in Albuquerque, and the coloured lights flickering. The hiss and steam of the motel shower, and Kaoru. And Kaoru.  
  
'Hey.'   
He half-turned, already smiling, and accepted the arm around his waist; Kaoru's voice was sleepy, hoarse, and he was blinking, struggling to focus because he wasn't wearing his glasses. He looked as though he'd rolled out of bed and come straight outside; same loose T-shirt, same messy hair. The one concession he'd made to the outdoors seemed to the pyjama pants he'd hastily stepped into: he didn't often wear them to sleep, these days.   
'What are you doing up?' he asked.   
Toshiya shrugged, closing his eyes, allowing himself to be lulled by the feeling of the body pressed up against his own. 'Couldn't sleep.'   
'Mm. Every time I wake up I sort of jolt, thinking I've overslept.'   
'My theory is that humans were never meant to migrate this far from their homes,' Toshiya said, and turned to smile at the guitarist. 'But it's nice of you to come looking for me.'   
'Yeah, well. I can't have my bassist getting kidnapped. Think of the paperwork.'   
But he drew Toshiya's body slightly closer to his own, and when Toshiya rested his head on the other man's shoulder, he felt him smile against his hair. They were quiet for a moment, and then:   
'Holy shit. Did you see the size of that moth?'  
'Mmhm.'  
'It was the size of a  _hand_ .'   
'Size of  _your_ hand, maybe,' Toshiya said lightly, and was rewarded with a tiny pinch to his side that sent shivers right through him. He smiled, and then yawned.   
'Tired?'  
'I wish.'   
'When we get home,' Kaoru said quietly, 'I want you to lie in the bath while I unpack our stuff. We can order from that little place around the corner, eat it naked, and then fuck like Shinya isn't in the hotel room next to us.'   
Toshiya laughed softly, but shifted so his lips were more directly against Kaoru's neck. 'Sounds like a plan.'  
'Mm. And then we get a whole month off.'   
'A whole month of rehearsing for our  _next_ tour, you mean,' Toshiya corrected him mildly, but it was distracting, being so close to Kaoru's neck and smelling his skin like that. 'A whole month of you being uptight and bossy and managerial...' he made a soft sound of appreciation and felt the other man's hand tighten almost imperceptibly around his waist before falling away, linking with his own.   
'C'mon,' Kaoru said softly, 'Let's go back to bed.'  
'Yeah, okay.' He wrinkled his nose. 'I'm just not sleepy. I don't get it.'   
'Do it for my sake, then.' Kaoru hesitated. 'You know I can never sleep for too long if you're not...'   
Toshiya couldn't help but smile at the shy look the other man had taken on. 'Yeah,' he said gently, 'I know.'   
  
When Kaoru kissed him, it seemed to take all the breath out of him. Funny how he never quite got used to it; how it never failed to send a shiver through him, every time.   
'Maybe I can wear you out,' Kaoru said, and Toshiya stroked through the other man's hair gently, tucking it behind his ear. He took the opportunity to touch his neck, his jaw, his lips; all the little shapes of him, those familiar features he had admired for so many years. They were changed a little by age, as his own were: the eyes that looked up at him now were not the same eyes that had appraised him so sharply outside that long ago Nagano live house. They had softened, since then. They had grown warmer.   
'You ever get a song stuck in your head?' Kaoru asked idly, and Toshiya gave a gentle snort.   
'Yeah, of course.'  
'I've had the same one for  _weeks_ . Every time I think I've shifted it, it comes back when I least expect it.'  
'What song?'  
Kaoru's smile twisted a little with embarrassment. 'It's stupid.'   
'I'm sure it is.'   
'You'll think less of me.'   
'Than I already do? Impossible.'   
'Thank you, dearest,' Kaoru said sarcastically, and then gave a soft sigh. 'It's  _Islands In The Stream_ .'  
'Oh, wow. Turns out I  _can_ think less of you.'   
'I used to...it used to stalk me.'  
'Excuse me?' Toshiya said as delicately as he could.  
' _Islands In The Stream_ used to follow me around.'   
Toshiya took one last deep drag of his cigarette and then stubbed it out, pitching it neatly over the side of the veranda.   
'Islands in the stream,' he warbled softly, 'that is what we are...'  
'Toshiya.'   
'No one in between, how can we be wrong...'  
'Sail away with me,' Kaoru added grudgingly.   
'To another world...'  
'And we rely on each other—'  
'Ah  _ha_ . From one lover to another—'  
'Ah ha,' Kaoru finished drolly, and then shook his head. 'You're such an idiot, you know that?'   
'Careful. I've got another verse in me.'   
'I love you,' Kaoru said abruptly, because he never got tired of saying it.   
'I love you, too.' Toshiya smiled at him. 'C'mon.'   
  
In the close darkness of their room Toshiya pulled off his T-shirt and drew their two bodies together. He could feel the heart of the man he loved, beating against his own; could feel his breathing as it grew softer and faster. He stripped Kaoru of his pyjama pants and settled in against him, curling into the warmth of his skin.   
'Toshiya.' It was less of a word and more of a sigh; it was accompanied by a pair of small, strong, infinitely familiar hands that slid around his hips, stroked over his back and his shoulders and the side of his face, his collar bones, his chest. They kissed, and he grew hard, and Kaoru's mouth was cool and soft around him. He heard a soft noise escape his own lips, and they clasped hands on the bed.  
Sometimes it seemed that this life could not possibly belong to him: his band touring in the USA, the beautiful sunny brightness of his home back in Japan, the hands that held him now. Tending his little garden and bringing the herbs he grew in to Kaoru, crushing them against his fingertips for the other man to smell. Having the cat twine around his ankles, purring. Having sex in a nest of white sheets in the sleepy midmorning, lying afterwards in the bed they'd bought together.   
Arriving somewhere, and having it feel like home. The family that had grown up around him like bones.  
It was as if his whole life had been one long journey, speeding along on a highway. And he had always assumed that the point was to  _get_ somewhere – somewhere else, somewhere better – never really understanding that arriving would mean it was the end; that the point, all along, had been the other passengers who had ended up travelling beside him. Kyo, on a road of his own – one with far more detours, his roadmap a mess of scribbles – who could look at them now, and nod, and sometimes smile. Shinya, cruising along serenely with his hair blowing in the slipstream, his own path uninterrupted and uncluttered and perfectly straight. Die with all the extras he had accumulated around him; a counterpoint to himself, a copy of himself. Immersed, wherever he went, in love.   
And then of course, there was Kaoru.   
Sitting beside him, always.   
Retracing their route when they got lost.  
Reaching out across the seat to take his hand and to hold onto it, like it was something boundlessly precious; like he did not want to let it go.   
All of them together, on a highway.  
The last thing he took off was the necklace, a scored black plectrum strung on a thin metal chain. He kissed Kaoru on the lips and then gently pulled it off over the other man's head, hanging it carefully on the bed post, where he knew it would be safe until the morning. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's finally done!
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone who read this and commented - I really appreciate you following this story and sharing your thoughts with me. If you've been too shy up until now, this would be a great time to say hi! I really enjoyed writing this and ending it, and I hope you'll all have enjoyed reading it too.


End file.
